TANKNOLOGICAL SUPERIORITY
by Hank Davis
What newborn sentient tank wouldn’t develop a sense of humor? It exists in a world of extremes. On the one hand, it is a giant among mortals, true, capable of slinging hot death and blasting cities to the ground. But it is also still a very young thing, a thing with the needs and playfulness of a child. And even if such a tank doesn’t really have a mother and father, perhaps it would want them as badly as any other child. And perhaps it would protect those it chose as family at any cost. All jokes aside.
Another day, another invader from space. But it looked like this one was real.
I was picking up news broadcasts about it. I wasn’t supposed to do that, since the team thinks they would confuse me if I tried to square them with the simulated training input, but it’s always a challenge to sneak around my programmed restrictions, and I was also programmed not to be put off by challenges. The team hadn’t foreseen the subtle contradiction in the separate programs, and I wasn’t going to mention it to them.
The pro newsies didn’t really know what was going on, of course. They thought it was just another terrorist attack, and were concentrating on the pile of rubble where the Tesser Tower and adjoining buildings used to be, and only some online independents had noticed the big tank going down the street, squashing cars and flattening lampposts, and even they hadn’t picked up on what I thought was a large spacecraft hovering a few hundred miles up over the city, and I only detected it by sneaking into different government and civilian radar installations, and putting together different angles of scan from them. Whatever it was, it was absorbing and not reflecting radar impulses thrown at it, but with my overlapping scans I was able to spot a hole in the sky once I put together the different angles. And it wasn’t passing by, or in an orbit, or falling, so the way to bet was something artificial, not likely of Earth origin.
Unless the Cybernetic Research Foundation had gone all out to elaborately counterfeit an extravaganza—and I didn’t think their budget could stand it, with me eating up most of their funds—this wasn’t another training simulation.
Besides, I wasn’t getting the usual sort of input for simulations. In those, the special effects look more real than events shown in newssquirts. Sometimes with better character development, too, So, finally something was actually happening.
But I couldn’t move yet. They don’t want me going topside and charging around in reaction to a merely virtual crisis. Still, it looked like I really should be revving up—looked in real time, in the real world, that is.
While waiting for the three bosses—they can’t just have one boss maybe going off his or her nut, and ordering me into action, you know—I snuck around in Foundation databanks where I’m not supposed to go. (Just another challenge to be met!) I finally found two of the three trigger codes that would release me into action. The team called them passwords, but I thought trigger codes sounded way cooler. Still needed the third one, and I was scouring the networks, trying to find it—maybe it was only on paper?—when Dr. Rieber’s dedicated line went live and her voice came breathlessly in.
Of course, she wasn’t really breathless or she couldn’t have spoken, but she was obviously trying to cancel out an oxygen debt, breathing rapidly and loudly, and I detected strong stress indicia in her voice. They didn’t mean to build that into me, but the programs for voice print identification have unintended uses which I’ve explored, having plenty of time on my circuits. Anyway, from the several thousand works of fiction I had scanned in my copious spare time, I judged that using “breathless” to describe her voice was within the bounds of poetic license.
“Steeleye!” she said, yes, breathlessly, “Emergency. Get ready to roll.” Then she paused and said, slowly and carefully (but still a little out of breath), “Chain up!”
As I expected, it was indeed Dr. Rieber. I accessed a video pickup in the third floor’s hall, and saw her come out of her office and run for the elevators. No wonder she was breathless. And that was indeed the code phrase she was to give me. However, it was one of the two which I had already ferreted out, and I hadn’t located that still-lacking third one yet.
And besides, I was supposed to have at least one of the three humans authorized to give me instructions on board before I could move, another of the precautions to keep me from running amok.
The higher-ups in the Foundation were very concerned about me getting out of control. They would be even more concerned if they knew I had edited my programming so that I could move without anybody being on board. I doubted that they would accept the emergency as good reason for me to throw off my restraints. And, if they knew that, they might wonder what other controls I could veto.
Since I still didn’t have that third password, the matter was academic. I could probably work around that programmed restraint, too, but it would be complicated, and take a lot of seconds, possibly as much as half an hour. And it would be too obvious, and really alert the Foundation that their leash was weaker than they thought. I preferred not to be dismantled, which would probably be their reaction. Dismantling might not hurt, but where would I live afterward?
By now, Dr. Rieber had gotten to my sub-sub-subbasement level, and slipped her I.D. into the card reader next to me, and I could open my access door. As she ran inside, I saw Dr. Carl Knightley pop out of the other elevator on one of my building monitors. In a few minutes, he had joined Dr. Rieber in my control room.
“Steeleye,” he said, unnecessarily since he had my realtime attention (my cyberspeed attention was still spooking around in project databases, searching for that third password), then added, “F-I-A-W-O-D.”
That was his password. Unfortunately, it, too, was one I already had without authorization, though I hadn’t yet ferreted out what the letters stood for. So I was still stuck in place while I tried to work around my programming’s strictures.
Dr. Knightly spoke again (yes, breathlessly): “Erin, you shouldn’t be here. Only one of us is necessary. The Project can’t afford to lose both of us. Quick, get out.” He had dropped the pitch of his voice a bit and put a lot of authority into it. Too bad, his voice cracked on the last word.
Dr. Rieber’s pulse rate had been returning to normal, but now it shot up again. From that and her facial expressions, I knew that Dr. Knightley’s last sentence had been a strategic mistake. It had angered her, just like in similar male-female interactions in a few hundred of the movies I had speed-watched. Of course, I knew that the rest of his statement wasn’t completely true—their importance to the project wasn’t the main thing on his mind. I had observed how he looked at her when her attention was directed elsewhere. I had also noticed her reacting similarly to his presence, not to mention elevated pulse rates and widened pupils.
That also was like in those movies. And I decided I needed to reevaluate them. I hadn’t been sure about how close to reality they were.
Meanwhile, Dr. Rieber was replying. “You’re right, Carl, so stop giving me orders, and you just get your butt out of here. I’ll handle this.”
Actually, I would be the one handling the situation. (If I ever got that third password.) But I could tell that Dr. Knightley was also mad now. That was accompanied by obvious fear, anxiety, and, I thought less confidently, intense curiosity (that last one was trickier to identify). But mostly, they were now mad at each other.
It was a lot like those movies.
Then an outside phone call came in on the secure line. I connected it and put it on my inboard speakers. From the tone of the breathing, I had already identified the caller as Dr. Keith. A second later, he identified himself. “Steeleye, this is Dr. Keith. I can’t get into the building. Wreckage has blocked the entrance.”
“John, we’re both here, Carl and me,” Dr. Rieber said. “We need your password for Steeleye to get moving.”
“But I can’t get there. Debris has blocked the CRF building’s entrances.” He was repeating himself, but he did that frequently. “And I have to be in the building and in range of a monitor for the password to be acknowledged. That was a security measure we all agreed on.”
“You mean, you and Carl argued for it, and I was outvoted,” Dr. Rieber almost snarled. “I thought it was pinning Steeleye’s operational capabilities on a single weak break-point. And I was right.”
This might go on for some number of seconds (like hours to me) while mayhem was unfolding outside, so I spoke. “Dr. Rieber, I’ve noticed what you might call a loophole in my programs.”
Dr. Rieber had complained to me in the past that I should be discreet about the many loopholes I keep finding, and now was staring sternly into the nearest visual monitor, but didn’t say anything, so I continued.
“I don’t think Dr. Keith has to be present to deliver his password—just that an authorized person has to say it from inside the building. If he will tell you the password, and either of you repeat it here, that should work.” Actually, I now had the third password. Dr. Keith had unconsciously subvocalized it when he thought of it, and I had picked it up. Dr. Rieber knew I could hear subvocalizations, but that was another capability I thought I should otherwise keep under wraps—in particular, not letting Dr. Keith know about it.
Dr. Keith didn’t like my suggestion. “We need to plug that hole in the program as soon as poss—”
“Screw that, John!” Dr. Rieber snapped, “what’s the damned password?”
“Well . . . I don’t . . . very well, it’s Rumpelstiltskin.”
My passengers repeated the password, almost in unison, and it was time to roll. “Doctors Rieber and Knightley, please be seated and fasten your seat belts.” I said to my passengers. I thought of a line from one of those movies, “It’s gonna be a bumpy ride,” but did not say it.
Training took over in spite of their emotional states, and both followed my request. Then I started the big elevator and even bigger overhead doors on the two levels slid aside as we rose up rhrough them. So did the fast-food outlet whose foundation was also my third and last roof. It rose on powerful hydraulic jacks, and I came up under it. Fortunately, all the customers and staff had scurried away when nearby buildings started collapsing.
I gunned my motors, treads churning, and shot out from under the Cyberburger eatery, which began sinking back to ground level. Maybe we could keep the secret exit a secret if nobody had seen the levitating building. It not only provided cover for my exit, but the Cyberburger chain also made an annual profit, useful for the Foundation. Its hush-hush government appropriations were as miserly as they were secret.
I followed the trail of destruction left by the invader. No more than optical sensors were required. The interloper was almost as wide as the space between the buildings, even on a four-lane street with dividing shrubbery in the middle. Like the flattened lampposts, the shrubbery was now much the worse for wear.
Now that I was above ground, I picked up signals coming from the invader, and was also picking up similar signals coming down from the ship overhead. I made sure I recorded them, though I didn’t understand the conversation, of course. I began to run translation programs, with no real hope of success, but it was part of the drill.
My passengers now had their headsets on, I spoke only to Dr. Rieber, “The enemy is in sight, Mom. If this is an extremely elaborate simulation, now would be a good time to tell me.”
“No, Steeleye, this is really happening,” she subvocalized. “Please don’t call me mom.”
“You’re the only one hearing this. Suppose I call you Dr. Mom? You and Dr. Knightley are my parents, after all. You designed and programmed me. Dr. Keith is just an administrator. He’s a cranky old uncle, at best.”
“One of those demented uncles who need to be kept in the attic or basement,” she said, and actually smiled.
“What?” Dr. Knightley said. Dr. Rieber had spoken that one out loud.
“Sorry,” she said. “Thinking with my mouth open about our charming John Keith.”
Dr. Knightley also smiled. “Definitely a basement. A very deep one. Deeper than Steeleye’s digs.”
Dr. Rieber had asked me not to call her “mom” or otherwise communicate it where anyone else could hear, read, or otherwise perceive it, after I had sent her that Mother’s Day e-card which I had put together. I made it myself, Mom! She particularly had been bothered by the picture of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” which I had redone with the doc standing on the seashell instead of the original.
Steeleye, she had electronically replied, I’m na—, then she backspaced, then went on, not wearing anything.
Neither is Venus in the original, I noted. Just keeping the spirit of the original masterpiece.
At least you made me look better than I actually do. Thank you, I guess. But please don’t do this again.
As I approached the invader, I thought that the next Mother’s Day was 11482’044 seconds away, and I again wondered if she meant I shouldn’t make another card then, or I shouldn’t show her in the nude again. The imprecision of the request (she hadn’t phrased it as an order . . .) could leave an opening for something similar, though not identical.
Besides, I hadn’t made her look substantially different. My IR, UV, microwave, and other sensors let me pick up images through barriers much more substantial than a few layers of cloth, and the image of her on the seashell was taken from life, even if she mistakenly thought I had improved it. The only tinkering I had done was to move her arms and hands to match Venus’s futile attempt at modesty.
In many of those movies I had speed-watched, women didn’t realize that they were beautiful until some male noticed. That had seemed irrational to me at the time, but now I’d have to reconsider that they were accurately depicting human behavior. Of course, the women in most of those movies were wrapped in layers of cloth and that didn’t keep the males from noticing their appearance. Did those males have the ability, like me, to see through the cloth?
I needed to do further research, but couldn’t spare the seconds it would take now. We were closing on the target. I barely had time to recall that, while female beauty was not something I had been programmed to evaluate, Dr. Rieber’s appearance did not deviate greatly from the females I had observed while breaking into various online porn sites. I suspected, however, that my lack of the appropriate glands might keep me from adequate simulation of human reactions. I had wondered if I could formulate programs to mimic those same glandular effects, but had postponed the matter, awaiting more data.
As we approached, I had been watching that big tank, looking about eight storeys high. My ranging radar wasn’t helping much here. The microwaves were going out, but weren’t coming back, like a roach motel for radar signals. I was judging the thing’s height by the changing angle my visuals made as I kept one focused on its top while I approached it. I was also getting maximum height estimates from the fighter jets that dived at it before they were blasted out of the sky.
One of the crippled jets, or maybe one of their bombs, had struck the street ahead, My radar was more useful this time, telling me the resulting crater was 32.7 feet across and 15.4 feet deep at its center. The second figure was less certain, thanks to the pile of scattered debris sitting in the deepest part.
The sight in the forward screen bothered Dr. Knightley. “Is there room to get around that crater, Steeleye? I don’t think you can get over that wreckage.”
I agreed with that, but the crater was almost up to the fronts of the buildings on both sides, so I regretfully ignited my boosters. This was the sort of thing they had been designed for, but I had only ten minutes of rocket fuel onboard, due to space limitations.
Accordingly, I went over the crater in a low arc, lifting just enough to clear the central pile of clutter, landing with more of an impact than I would have preferred.
My passengers didn’t complain. “The boosters worked up to specs,” Dr. Rieber said. “Steeleye spanned the crater.”
I resumed my approach to target just as the surviving jets scattered and disappeared over the horizon. Some higher-up had noticed they weren’t doing any good, and besides, three or four of those planes were almost as expensive as I was. Once the jets were out of sight, several supersonic surface-to-surface missiles came arcing in, which worried me. If they were nukes, they might put a stop to the invader, but wouldn’t be good for me or my passengers. I’d already activated my energy shield, but it was experimental, and tests so far had not gone past infantry-carried anti-tank rockets and truck-mounted UV lasers.
The jury would remain out on the shield’s efficacy against nukes, since some kind of energy beam melted them hundreds of yards away from the target, and big molten blobs, suddenly lacking propulsion, plopped onto the street and still-standing buildings. After that, a score of elliptical objects swarmed out of the tank, and took up position, hovering over it.
I didn’t know if the missiles were nukes, even little 10K ones, but maybe the invader did.
The oval defenders weren’t showing any interest in me so far, but I didn’t know how long that happy neglect would last, so I tried my heavy laser on the invader. It didn’t penetrate; worse, my IR sensors showed no increase in temperature of the spot I’d trained the big light on.
In fact, the whole structure was showing no detectable temperature at all, except for a few things sticking out of its sides and on its top which might be some kind of antennae, unless they were big fishing rods and tennis rackets (no visible mesh, though, so that guess was unlikely).
Whatever they were, after I tried that laser shot, they all retracted, so maybe they would have been vulnerable. Had been. Past tense data wasn’t helping in present tense.
Then things got tenser as something popped over the structure’s topmost edge and pointed at me. It turned out to be a laser, smaller than mine, but I wasn’t counting any chickens yet. I tried to dodge, spinning my auxiliary treads to push me sideways, but it still hit me. The good news was that my shield deflected most of the energy. The bad news was that that laser was smaller than mine, but a lot more powerful. The iffy news, needing analysis by an expert panel discussion, was that the shield was experimental, and how much of an all-out alien assault could it take?
I was born—or assembled, at least—to multitask, and while the duel between unequals was going on, I was also paying attention to my passengers, who had been holding hands—clenching hands was more like it—since they saw my front monitor displaying the jets being shot down. Their senses were orders of magnitude slower than mine, so they didn’t see the supersonic missiles hurtle into the game, but they clenched harder when the falling molten blobs became visible. (I decided not to show them a slow-mo instant replay of the missiles hurtling futilely in.) As the molten maybe-nukes hit and spattered, Dr. Knightley said, “Why did I let you come? We’ll both be killed!”
I didn’t think he was talking to me, and Dr. Rieber obviously concurred. “It wasn’t your decision, Carl, and I didn’t need your damned permission. This is our job: to help Steeleye and . . .”
She had been talking tough, but I could hear the fear in her voice. I don’t know if she trailed off because she realized that neither of them had any way to help me unless they ordered me to surrender (for certain values of “help”) or because just then the enemy laser hit. An intense beam of coherent light didn’t make me rock or rattle, like in those movies, but it did make my internal lights dim for a tenth of a second, and turned the shield, seen from inside, into a festival of sparkles.
And just then, I had suddenly moved sideways which would have been disconcerting even if we weren’t in a high-tech firefight. There were plenty of reasons to leave sentences unfinished.
Dr. Knightley took up the slack, though not very coherently. He had put his left arm around Dr. Rieber, pulling her sideways to him, and was saying, “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God . . .” I didn’t think he was praying.
Dr. Rieber snapped out of her silence and said, “Get a grip, Carl, you’ll distract Steeleye. And quit . . .” She trailed off again, without specifying what her companion should quit doing. Maybe she decided she liked it, at least at this moment. Or she might have realized that I could carry on many actions simultaneously, and her admonition against distracting me was nonsense.
She should have known that, since she had made me that way. Of course, moms know best, but they can be excitable at times.
If she had known that the alien tank had started talking, or trying to talk to me, all at the same time as the other action, she probably would, in calmer moments, not have been surprised I could keep track of it all. But the choice of language might have startled her.
I was programmed for all the major languages, human and computer, but I hadn’t expected to be addressed in Mandarin Chinese.
I responded in the same tongue: “You do know you’re not in China, don’t you?” At the very least, invaders from space ought to know which country they’re invading.
It answered in English, “Doesn’t China control this planet yet?”
Its broadcast didn’t elaborate, just then, but I was getting the context. In fact, I was getting a metaphorical earful. While it had that link open to me, I was picking up a torrent of other information. The invader only had simple safeguards.
And it was not using a dedicated Chinese language program. Words in its own language—or probably its builders’—were coming from the controller computer, then an extra program was converting them into Chinese. All around Robin Hood’s barn (the metaphor could cast me as Robin Hood, I suppose, stealing from the invader and giving to the poor humans).
By computer nerd standards, it would have been pure hacker-bait, except for another factor. The window of opportunity was very brief; and there was a physical, literal window involved. When the literal window was open in the invader’s armor, the computer inside could talk to me, and I could yell back. But it wasn’t open very long by most standards, and though it was a reasonably long time to me, it moved. It would close, then open in another spot on the tank. I tried predicting its next location and failed three times. What I tell you three times is Big Trouble. I might be able to get in a shot with the laser through the opening before it closed after a couple of seconds being open. Only I wasn’t sure how much damage that would do. As a last-ditch effort, I would try it, but I was getting all sorts of vital information in the meantime.
Whether my humans and I would be around long enough to use it was another matter.
Said humans were getting uneasy since nothing seemed to be happening as far as they could tell. Not surprisingly, Dr. Knightley asked, “Steeleye, what’s happening? Are you damaged?”
Humans need attention, so I started running a line of text across the bottom of the front monitor. Since a couple of minutes had gone by, I had amassed a lot of data, so I wasn’t throwing all of it at them, but I had a good idea of what was going on. The invader wasn’t telling me much directly—it was mostly asking questions to which I gave evasive answers—but as I had found, its cyber-defenses were pathetic.
So I summarized: The tank is an extraterrestrial war machine controlled by a computer. No living aliens aboard it. It came down from a spaceship that’s hovering 347 miles overhead. (At that, both doctors looked up involuntarily, though there was nothing to see but my upper bulkhead—humans are so cute!). It has a gravity deflector, but considerable mass, so it smashed buildings it landed on or grazed when it touched down. It’s here to reconnoiter and test our technology. Another ship, an unarmed scout observed us about 20 years ago, so this armed ship was sent this time, to see if we might be dangerous and needed to be knocked back to the stone age, or even wiped out. They are surprised that China isn’t running the whole planet, since the Chinese seemed poised to take over 20 years ago.
And that might have happened, except for a wild card. A dissident group had gotten hold of an Iranian nuke in 2038 and set it off in Beijing. In the chaos that followed, China had broken up into Free Tibet, the expanded Formosan Republic, Greater Hong Kong, and others. Worry in the U.S. about the resultant instability was a factor that led to an R&D defense project which finally led to me. The possibility of being invaded by ETs instead of humans was also considered but thought to be an unlikely wild card. Too bad those wild cards can come back and bite.
The weird thing is that these ETs are mostly much more advanced than we are, but their computer science is a big exception. Their safeguards are wet tissue paper and I’m going through them like the mother of all sneezes. I’ve copied their language program and now understand their language, something which I hope they don’t know.
Actually, I was sure they didn’t know that I now understood the transmissions going back and forth between the big tank and the mothership. Even better, I now understood all the previous alien broadcasts that I had recorded on the way to the fight. So if the high-up aliens didn’t send any orders to the tank for a minute, I had time to look for a point of attack.
Of course, I didn’t have that minute. The ship now broadcast orders which I freely translated as, Their offensive armaments are weak, though that defensive screen looks promising, but easy to overwhelm by heavier weapons. Try to find out how it operates, but otherwise proceed with the standard program, which should be sufficient to stop all native progress. Be ready to be picked up when we return in [untranslatable time unit].
At which point the ship left.
Okay, they didn’t think I was any threat to their plan. But I was still processing the pirated data, and I thought I had found a weak spot, except the big tank wasn’t talking to me anymore. It had closed that roving hole in its armor. Then I picked up the fringe of a weaker transmission aimed upwards but not straight up. Immediately, one of the ovoids hovering over the invader lost altitude and headed for me. As it approached, it changed shape, becoming a slender harpoon form. I tried to hit it with the big laser and my smaller ones, but it dodged the main gun’s shot, and shrugged off the small fry, and slammed into my topside. The energy shield slowed it down, but didn’t stop it, and it began drilling through my roof.
Very bad timing—no, make that disastrous timing! I had found a weak spot but I had no way of exploiting it now that the invader had closed the opening in its neutronium armor. I had found out that was what was enclosing it: a thin layer of neutronium held in place by a molecule-deep controlled gravity field, keeping it from exploding. The stuff that dead stars are made of, and only gravity could get through it. And so heavy that only another gravity gadget, drastically reducing the overall weight of the tank, kept the whole structure from sinking into the ground like a lead weight dropped into water. Even very muddy water. And I had just found the controls for the gravity deflector when the tank pulled up the drawbridge and lowered the blinds.
When the point of the enemy harpoon came through the upper bulkhead, Dr. Knightley hugged Dr. Rieber, and she hugged back, but neither screamed. I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had, but Dr. Rieber only asked, “Steeleye, is that projectile going to explode?” This time, it was her voice that cracked on the last syllable, but that was forgiveable. All right, Mom and Dad!
I flashed DON’T PANIC! on the front screen and tried to reprogram the projectile—it didn’t have neutronium armor—or else fry its circuits, but I could tell it was a very dumb robot. It was getting instructions from the tank, which meant that a link had to be open to the tank’s interior.
I could feel the alien’s probe poking around in my software. Dr. Keith would have said that I was imagining the sensation, since I hadn’t been designed to feel anything. But he was just an administrator, and I knew better. Besides, he was on record as arguing that I had no imagination. Humans, with their organic limitations, have trouble being consistent. I thought the feeling might be like being tickled, though all I knew about the sensation of being tickled came from second or third hand sources.
I threw a bushel of movies at the invader’s invader, trying to slow it down for maybe a second while I poked in the other direction. I was using the probe’s own link to the alien tank to get into its software, and there it was again: the control for the gravity deflector.
It didn’t have an off switch, and I hadn’t expected one, But there was a control to alter the modified weight of the tank, probably to allow it to adjust to the different gravity pulls of different planets.
It wasn’t designed to let the deflection go down to zero, or even very low, but I did some highspeed rewriting of that program, then set it for zero as I fired my boosters and rose into the air.
To my passengers, the tank seemed to disappear from the monitors. With my quicker perception, I watched it sink into the ground in a fraction of a second. Next stop, center of the Earth. In place of the tank, a wave of shattered concrete, broken conduits, and just plain rocks and dirt was going upward, spreading out as it went, an avalanche in reverse.
Got you last, I thought.
I was heading backwards away from the oncoming wave, took a few seconds to spin around, then hit full thrust on the boosters, and put distance and altitude between me and what I thought was coming.
I thought right. I was airborne, but from the way buildings were shaking, many of them crumbling, and a new geyser of subterranean debris was shooting out of the hole, I knew that the neutronium shell had been liberated with the catastrophic failure of whatever the tank used for a power source. If its fuel was antimatter, the failure would have added more than a little violence deep down.
I checked on some of the fragments from below as they began to fall back, compared them with the local geological records, and estimated that the invader had gotten at least two-thirds of a mile down before exploding.
I came to ground just in time—the boosters were almost out of rocket juice, I started for the Cyberburger exit, but found a large boulder had landed on it. The hydraulic jacks tried, but couldn’t handle the extra weight, so I headed for the alternate entrance.
I could give full attention to my passengers now. Drs. Rieber and Knightley were still hugging each other and conversing earnestly.
They realized that we were all still alive (Dr. Keith to the contrary, I was alive), and separated a little, still holding hands. Dr. Rieber said, “Steeleye, don’t listen in. Unless there’s another emergency, we’re having a private conversation.”
I dutifully obeyed and switched off my internal mikes. Since Mom hadn’t given instructions about what they had been saying beforehand, but might think of deleting it later, I made a couple of copies and tucked them away in other files.
I considered the tech I had swiped from the invader, and wondered how much to give to the humans without them becoming wary of my spying capabilities. But that gravity tech needed to be worked on immediately, along with the propulsion used by the now quiescent harpoon still imbedded in my topside. When the alien ship came back, we needed to be ready. I considered creating fictitious scientists and research groups to “discover” other, less urgently needed technologies. Maybe I could take a page from one of my illustrious but fictional colleagues, and use the name Adam Selene, but decided that would be too obvious. As would be using Adam Link. Oh, well.
And it looked like my parents would be involved with more than me from now on. They might even make it legal.
I would have to watch out for them, of course. Humans are so fragile, and think so slowly. Again, I thought of a scene from one of those movies, this one with a teenage boy and girl talking about this very subject. “You have to watch out for your parents,” the young lady says. “They have no clue what’s really going on.”
I’d be watching. I don’t really understand why so many books and visuals show malevolent computers menacing humans. Humans are cute and fascinating to watch and interact with. Like kittens, I thought. I had asked for a kitten, but Dr. Keith had vetoed the request. I think he suspected me of wanting to dissect it or something even worse.
It occurred to me that if my parents got married, or even if not, they might have a child. And after enough seconds had passed, the child might ask for a kitten. And I could make their acquaintance. Need a baby sitter, Doctors?
The future was looking interesting. Unpredictable, of course, like human thinking, but that made it more fun.
I’m glad humans invented fun. And me.