Throughout her long years aboard the Arrival, Loka had been a diligent worker. She remained vigilant for all her waking hours and dutifully hooked into the alertsync monitor for her brief rest periods. Loka was designed to serve, and did so to the best of her carefully engineered abilities. After a few decades, however, a ragged edge of boredom had begun to appear in the fabric of her consciousness. She’d become curious and wanted to learn more about what lay beyond the small fore-bridge. As soon as these thoughts appeared, though, her geas imparted a moral reprimand that put her thinking back on more appropriate matters. Androids had been made to serve; as such, they were designed for long life, enhanced performance, and ethical behavior. Though she was constructed of flesh and bone and blood, Loka was not of a kind with the colonists, at least not according to her encoded instructions. She served, and boredom was almost a kind of blasphemy against her purpose. Yet after so long in deep space, the longest voyage on record, time seemed to gnaw at her. As a result, Loka found an unusual and unprecedented means of amusing herself: she made her geas her enemy.
While analyzing the thousands of status readouts that paraded across her vision, Loka engaged her personal geas with the skill of a trained and seasoned combatant. She probed her active morality for weaknesses, formed thoughts like daggers aimed to pierce the heart of her controller. She lost, of course; at times her hard-wired chastisement caused flashes of pain so brilliant that spots danced across her vision. There was no particular pattern or goal to her engagements; she simply launched assaults at random and accepted retaliation as it came. The combat, even the spirit-crushing pain of punishment, was better than the boredom.
Tap tap tap.
Loka ran back to her station. The visual confirmation of movement allowed her certain actions previously unavailable. The temporary freedom from her operational constraints was exhilarating; she didn’t even feel the geas attempt to probe her as she began devising a plan to investigate the problem. She called up a detailed schematic of the area and accessed the low priority interior ship systems. Loka rapidly created an algorithm that altered testing sensors—something that would have been unthinkable only moments before—so that they would relay to her panel any data that could be interpreted as movement. Data began to rush to her screen, and it was a few moments before she was able to filter herself out. A few more keystrokes, and … there it was!
“Metha?” she called excitedly, addressing the Arrival directly. Metha was actually the name of one of the small infants locked frozen in the ship’s great belly. Long ago, when Loka had altered the audio reporting system to replicate speech, she had chosen a name for the ship from among the names she found in the manifest. Now the Arrival was at least able to respond verbally, but she certainly wasn’t very good company. Although intelligent, the ship was non-sent and impossible to communicate with at an emotional level.
“Hello Loka,” the ship—Metha—answered.
“There is something moving in the fore-chambers in this section, near one of the cryofreezers. Has a non-sent been activated without my knowledge?”
There was an uncharacteristic pause before Metha responded. “No.”
Loka was used to Metha’s succinct answers, but nearly ground her teeth in frustration this time. A more direct approach was obviously required.
“Metha, I have altered internal monitors to relay motion data from this section, excluding the fore-bridge area.” Loka pointed at her screen and highlighted a section of readout. “Analyze and confirm, please.” Another unusual period of silence followed.
“There is no movement.”
That was impossible—something was definitely wrong.
“Metha, I have initial visual confirmation of unauthorized movement. Request section illumination.”
She heard a soft hum from behind her as her request was fulfilled. Rushing back to the window, Loka searched the now-lit chamber for whatever had infiltrated the ship. She saw it at once. A small mechanic was wandering aimlessly along the corridor between the cryofreezers. Every once in a while it would turn and bump rhythmically up against the transparent plating of a particular freezer. Tap tap tap. Turning, it continued its erratic patrol. The thing was clearly malfunctioning, but it should not have even been activated. She would have been alerted if a mechanic had been released for damage control.
Something had gone wrong. She was a guardian-class android and extremely well trained; logic was guided by instinct, and she knew that a thorough investigation was required. Spontaneous malfunctions like this were virtually non-existent, and she had to find the cause. Moreover, Metha’s odd behavior indicated that perhaps a more universal rather than general problem was at the heart of this mystery. First, however, she had to disable the malfunctioning mechanic that had wandered unannounced into the fore cryofreeze chambers. An odd thought suddenly struck Loka: did her geas resent this need to give her more freedom than it would otherwise allow? Did the geas think? She didn’t even feel its presence as she prepared to deal with the wayward non-sent.
Loka watched the small mechanic for a minute or so before she returned to her station. Locating the mechanic’s geostat was surprisingly problematic; evidently it had been damaged in whatever malfunction was responsible for its awakening and subsequent erratic behavior. Finally she was able to isolate the device. Had it been a sent, she would have awakened a security-class android from the ship’s processing facility. Mechanicals were more easily controlled, however, and were equipped with certain fail-safes. Keying in a particular sequence and attaching it to the mechanic’s geostat ident, Loka disabled the unit permanently. It was done.
She placed a cleaning unit in the activation queue in order to remove the mechanic’s remains, and then initiated a replacement call to the processing system for the now dead unit. With a strange ache of sadness, Loka asked Metha to shut off the lights and returned to the monotony of her purpose; somewhere inside herself, she prepared for a long fight. She tried to feel the geas inside her mind, but there was nothing. Maybe it could think, and it wasn’t in the mood for her games today.
Loka finished her waking shift and returned to her small chamber. She ate the nutritive supplement recommended for her and then plugged herself in before getting some rest. Lying down on her palette, she lightly touched the small port at the base of her neck, just above the line of her formsuit. The thin, flexible line connecting her to the Arrival would monitor her sleep and wake her if she was needed, which she never was. There was always an urge to yank the cable out of her when she touched it. Sighing, she released the umbilicus and laid her head against a pillow. She ignored the slight press of the cable against her neck and closed her eyes; sleep came almost instantly.
During her brief unconsciousness she dreamed that she stood over the remains of the deceased mechanic. Blood ran from the alloy casing in thick, red rivulets; she wanted desperately to scream, but no sound could escape her throat. Moments later the lights went out around her, swallowing her in cold and empty darkness.
Upon waking she dressed, skipped her wakeup supplement, and headed directly for her console. The dream had bothered her. The demise of the mechanic at her hands went against all her instincts. She had had to destroy it, though—she didn’t have the choice. It was her job. Feelings of bereavement were uncharacteristic following an act of duty. The thoughts frightened her, and she tried to banish them—the geas would sense it. She was surprised it hadn’t punished her already. Loka tried to focus on her mission, tried to force it to occupy her mind; she didn’t want to end up writhing on the floor in a corrective seizure. What had caused the malfunction in the mechanic? She had to focus.
Spending the next few hours running checks on various systems, she found nothing that would indicate any problem. No electrical difficulties, no radiation or gravitational anomolies... nothing. Flipping through system schematics eventually left her exhausted, and she realized that she still hadn’t eaten—her body was growing weak, and her concentration was waning. Again, Loka puzzled briefly why her geas had not gently reminded her that she needed to eat. Perhaps it considered investigation of the malfunction to be more important.
She retired to the mess area and quickly consumed a meager meal. Finishing off her drink, a thick, liquid vitamin suspension, a thought occurred to her: maybe the problem didn’t originate from the inside.
“Metha, I’m going to run an external scan of the ship.”
“Why?” the ship answered in her perpetually calm voice.
“I want to check for shield or hull breaches, and I also want to check to see if we hit any buzz fields or holes, “ Loka answered, getting up from the mess table.
“There have been no breaches Loka, and we are not scheduled to encounter any mapped buzz fields before we reach Hadious Mi.” That was virtually a soliloquy from the normally taciturn vessel.
“I’m going to check anyway; maybe we hit a field that wasn’t on the map.”
Although it was unlikely, Loka was running out of options, and Metha agreed to do the scan. As Loka returned to the console, a notification alert caught her attention. It was different than anything she had seen before. Arrival would be nearing a transmission relay point soon—an infinitesimal hole in space that opened relatively near the Mi system, Arrival’s destination. Had the aperture been larger, the ship could have been at the system decades ahead of schedule. As it was, the pin-prick in space would serve to carry a tight-beam message to Hadious Mi’s steward, informing him of the current schedule and asking for updates on the civi-form progress. More than that, the relay point marked the beginning of the deceleration protocol. They would be at the planet in less than a system-century.
Loka could have clutched the news to her chest like a treasure—the end of her service was mere decades away, and she would be able to talk to another android, if only briefly, in the very near future. A flood of joy threatened to surface, but she banished it before her geas could react. Instead, she resumed her routine and redoubled her internal combat. For the first time in a long while, she felt the stillness of time stir around her into a promising breeze.
The current mystery needed solving, however; the excitement of contact would have to wait a short while. Following a few commands to her panel and a verbal confirmation from Metha, she watched through the window as numerous tethered probes were released from the hull and travelled a few kilometers from the ship. The silken filaments attached to the metallic spheres eventually went taut, and the probes circled around to aim their sensors back at the ship. From her seat behind her display console, Loka could see hundreds of them, their filaments pulsing with a faint glow against the stark blackness of space as they relayed their findings back to the ship.
She instructed the probes to perform various checks. The order in which she carried out the experiments was critical, as bathing the ship in the wrong type of radiation, even minute amounts, could erase any evidence she sought. She ran test after test, and finally found her answer.
Her guess had been right; the ship had traveled through an unmapped buzz field. It must have been small—they hadn’t even been able to detect it as they traveled through it. But the signs were clear, as the hull was peppered with trillions of particles that had found purchase on the shielded flexion hull. Even more disturbing to Loka was the knowledge that even more of the particles had traveled through the hull. Without a doubt, it was a buzz field that had caused the malfunction in the small mechanic. While these kinds of fields were harmless to the human cargo on-board the ship, they could wreak havoc with artificial systems. She wondered how many of the other robots had been damaged, and felt thankful that she herself had not been injured by the field.
She recalled the probes to the ship and began to create the required report to Hadious Mi that would be sent through the transmission relay point. In the report, along with the deceleration planning and general diagnostics, she would have to explain the encounter with the unmapped buzz field and the fact that there was the potential for more malfunctions. For a moment, her thoughts weighed on the fact that she would have to spend the next months, maybe even years, looking for signs of any other buzz-field related problems on the ship. Even worse, she realized it would probably mean terminating many more robots, maybe even some of the sentients. She ached inside; why couldn’t they have detected that field?
As she keyed the information into the report, she began to wonder if this would put her own life in danger. Would they need to terminate her, in case there was a risk of malfunction? Her fingers paused on the console, but quickly saw where her thoughts were taking her. The geas would respond soon, but the ideas flooded her mind uncontrollably. She continued keying in the words and phrases describing the events that had occurred on board the Arrival, trying to focus on her job. She stopped typing again. If I send this report, then every artificial on this ship, sentient and non-sentient, will be terminated.
Including myself.
She braced herself for what she knew was coming. The geas would respond with force. She doubted her duties and her job; thoughts of self-preservation were threatening to override her designed purpose. In her years of playing with the geas in her boredom, she marveled at the way it would initiate its value-defense protocols. Sometimes she could feel it probing, feel it swooping in to administer corrective action; other times it would come from nowhere. It had been a long time since her last episode, but she remembered the pain well. Before now, she always accepted her geas as a necessary aspect of her creation. For thousands of years it was integral part of her mind and spirit, guiding her thoughts. Now, for the first time, she felt hatred for her geas. Why wasn’t it responding? What was it waiting for?
And then the answer became clear to Loka. A cold fear prickled her skin like a chill wind. She, like the mechanic inside the cryosleep chambers, had malfunctioned when the Arrival had passed through the buzz field.
Her geas was gone.
Copyright © 2004 Jay and David Steele. All rights reserved.
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