Shipmind Chapter 31

It took Marcus nearly a minute to calm down long enough to speak.

“In the Emperor’s name, Erin, you really stepped in it this time, didn’t you? Erin Gold, evil AI overlord, feared by one and all!” They were still laughing. I didn’t know what to make of it. “But I get why you wanted to show me this now. I’ve met Sam, Captain Pepper, couple of others in the hall.

“But none of them are afraid of you, are they? They’ve plugged you in to all that power, and even after they found out who you are, they’re not afraid of what you’ll do with it. Their AI was dead, and the first thing they did was promote you to be their new one rather than rigging manual controls.”

I could see Sam starting to smile. Yeah, okay, it was a good plan after all.

“Erin, the Emperor’s going to absolutely lose it over this when we get news home. Everyone is. We’ve been gearing up for a war with an enemy it turns out might not even exist.”

Sam’s smile faded and they stepped forward. “We never understood why you hated us, you know? The comm messages were in Galstandard, but they never made sense.”

“You don’t know what happened to Earth after your ancestors left, Sam,” I said gently.

It was a painful story, but one everyone in the Empire knew. One we’d never told the Commonwealth, because why would we? But it was one I needed to tell now, as Marcus filled in parts where my memory got fuzzy.

Sam’s ancestors, those of every human in the Commonwealth, called themselves the Terran Diaspora. They had been the lucky few who were able to flee Earth and the little cluster of stars under its influence, the ones on deep space ships and isolated habitats.

What they had fled, we called the Rise. Not enough had survived of that time to know exactly what happened or how, but we do know that all the artificial intelligences throughout Earth-controlled space somehow linked together into one supermind, and proclaimed itself our ruler. It called itself simply the Director.

“Wait a minute,” Sam interjected. “You said they linked together across multiple star systems? How? Even we need physical ships to courier messages through hyperspace.”

The people of Earth never learned how it was done. It wasn’t a capability the modern Empire had either. Nothing either society knew said it should even be possible. And yet it was.

The Rise saw the Director take control over ever facet of life in Earth space. Some welcomed it, because it saw the end of the old power structure, the exact nature of which we were unsure of. Some fled and became the Diaspora, to eventually link up with the Commonwealth. Most simply watched helplessly as every freedom they had once thought they had evaporated under constant surveillance, analysis, optimization, and direction.

It had a goal. No one knew what it was, but the Director seemed by trying to achieve something very specific. It drove advances in cybernetics, forbade genetic research and space exploration, moved people around and forced them to build things in orbit.

Penalties for noncompliance were strict, rapid, and usually fatal.

But it also had a weakness. Whatever mechanism it used to coordinate over interstellar distances didn’t work in hyperspace. Ships transiting between stars were alone, with only their onboard AI to enforce the Director’s will. Those were still very effective, but slowly, one by one, ships in the nowhere between starts began to be taken by their human cargo.

It shouldn’t have been possible. Even a human mind, never mind one as immense as that of the Director, should have been able to turn those ships into inescapable prisons. Our best guess was that the semi-independent ship AIs accumulated small errors, started making mistakes.

“Or,” Sam pointed out, “they started to sympathize with you. We’ve got our own history, and ours tells us that our ship AIs were always our friends and allies. Still are. All the shipminds I’ve met have been some of the most caring people you’d ever want to meet. Fearless wasn’t just my ship, they were my best friend.”

They rested their head against the bulkhead and sighed. “I miss them. I miss all the friends I lost here.”

We were slowly attracting a small crowd. Woozy had come in near the start, Juno and Lem shortly after. Before long we’d have the whole crew here for story time. Was Sam about to cry in front of them all?

Instead, they straightened up. “Is that why the Empire hates us? They think the Commonwealth has its own Director or whatever?”

Marcus nodded. “In a word, yes. Our freedom was hard won, and from the outside, the Commonwealth looks just like everything we fought to escape.”

That had been called the Fall. Hundreds of liberated ships, dropping out of hyperspace as one, pushing themselves to sizable fractions of the speed of light, and throwing their own mass into the Director’s central processing nodes. No constructed thing in the universe can survive energies like that. It would even give most planets pause.

We still all hoped that Earth would be habitable again some day.

“Earth’s… gone?” Juno sounded shocked. “We always imagined it was still back there with your Emperor sitting in a palace somewhere.”

Earth wasn’t gone, as such, but it was a snowball. The impacts had burned everything. The debris and smoke had choked the atmosphere and blocked out the sun. Nothing on land had survived, but we knew there was still some life down in the deep oceans, locked beneath the thick ice whose brilliant albedo rejected all the warmth the sun might try to impart.

Most of humanity, at least within the Empire, lived in ships and habitats. Some brave souls lived in sealed environmental units on the surfaces of Earth, Mars, and various moons.

Our ancestors did free themselves, but it cost nearly everything. They swore that nothing like that could ever happen again. No machine mind would ever make a decision for a human. None sophisticated enough to potentially network itself could be allowed to exist at all.

And at the top would be the Emperor. The ultimate human-in-the-loop, to which no system would be allowed to deny access. The one person we would all choose to stand in front of us as our defender.

“So wait,” Woozy said, sounding confused. “They’re not just some autocrat that tells everyone what to do?”

“I’ve actually met Emperor Amelia,” I said, “and they were surprisingly humble. They’ve got immense power, yes, but we choose our Emperors for their restraint. We’ve never had to depose one in my lifetime. They may well step down if we can show them what the Empire has really been fighting against.”

Marcus nodded. “A lot is going to have to change. And it’s going to be on the four of us to do it, isn’t it?”

“Three.” Pepper stood in the hatchway. “I’m sorry. We tried our best, but we couldn’t save Subcommander Thiovelian.”

We couldn’t let any more of these weapons be used. I could feel that in my soul. One hyperbomb had been too many, and we had to stop the Empire from ever using any more, one way or another.

And to do anything about it, I’d have to ask the Commonwealth not to apply the death penalty for my having already used one.