The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [83]
That was when it first occurred to me that the AI might be lying. I was, after all, in a VE suit, prey to any manufactured illusion the AI cared to feed me. I wasn’t even completely sure that I had been in meatspace before the melodrama had got under way, and given that this was melodrama through and through, the hypothesis that it was all fake couldn’t be ignored.
I tried to think it through.
If the AI was lying about the attack, then what I was involved in was a kidnapping. The ship had been taken over, and whoever had taken control of it was kidnapping Adam Zimmerman. And me. Not to mention…except, of course, that if the ship’s AI had been programmed to do all this, then it must be Niamh Horne who was kidnapping Adam Zimmerman. And me. Not to mention Michael Lowenthal, etc, etc.
Or must it?
I didn’t like Niamh Horne, but the scenario that gave her the role of evil mastermind seemed, nevertheless, to be a much less worrying alternative than the ones in which we really were being attacked by aliens from God-only-knew-where, or hijacked by persons unknown. It was bad enough to have to worry about the posthuman races going to war with one another, without factoring hostile aliens into the picture, and the probability that anyone else could have masterminded the hijack of Niamh Horne’s ship seemed slim. In which case, Niamh Horne surely had to be the one who was playing us all for fools…
Nothing dispels terror more efficiently than a conviction that one has been taken for a mug. Emotional arousal is negotiable, and fear can be readily transmuted into anger.
“You lying bastard,” I said to the AI. “Tell me the truth. Where are we going? Why? In my day, one of the major driving forces behind the evolution of the artificial idiots the people called sloths into the artificial geniuses that people called silvers was the demand for sims that could answer the phone, filter the desirable calls from all the silvery junk, and reply adequately to those callers who only required simple responses. It would be an oversimplification to say that the principal functions of everyday AIs were telling lies and spotting lies, but it wouldn’t be too far off the truth. Ergo, I knew better than to imagine, even for a moment, that telling an AI to tell me the truth would be a viable command — but I was under stress, and we all do stupid things when we’re under stress. Even AIs do stupid things when they’re under stress.
“We are heading away from the sun,” the AI told me. “Should we contrive to evade the continuing pursuit, I shall seek guidance as to an appropriate destination. For the time being, I am making every effort to avoid being destroyed or captured.”
I had no alternative but to think: What if it is true?
“Show me,” I demanded — but the supersilver came over all pedantic and didn’t respond until I made myself clearer. “Show me the ships that are attacking us,” I said, glad to be able to be businesslike.
The virtual space surrounding my gently cradled head was abruptly filled with starlight, but the controlling intelligence moved swiftly to dim the background glare and pick out four objects that might otherwise have faded into it. The viewpoint zoomed in, tacitly admitting that the image I’d be getting had been heavily processed in the interests of clarity.
One of the objects was easily recognizable as Excelsior. The other three seemed, at first glance, to be more closely akin to the microworld than to the Titanian ship. Unlike the vessel I was on, whose furled “wings” had linked it in my imagination to a seabird, the things that were pursuing us looked more like a small school of squid, all jetting along with their bunched tentacles trailing behind.
They were shooting at us, and hitting us almost every time. At least, they seemed to be shooting at us, the way spaceships in VE space operas that were dated even in my day shot at their targets. I knew that the lines the AI was tracing across the image were diagrammatic representations, and that they would have to be diagrammatic representations even if there