PrincessColumbia

  “You’re the bartender here?” Geoffry’s avatar asked.

  The man behind the counter was wearing a semi-ubiquitous ‘proper bartender’ outfit of a vest, white shirt, and bow tie. His sleeves had bck ties above his elbows to give the shirt’s forearms a slightly ‘puffy’ look. “I certainly would seem to be, yes,” the A.I. replied in canned-bartender-snark.

  Geoffry pulled what amounted to a digital badge out of his toolkit. The analysts carried a briefcase throughout VR with their gear, functioning as crime scene techs during the few times they needed to actually go into an environment to button down file. The ‘badge’ did, indeed, look like a badge, a simir design to the one in Diane’s wallet, in fact. Like her own, it was actually a bit of software payload. If an A.I. perceived it, the badge pinged against the permissions stack the A.I. was built on top of and the software would treat the analyst as an administrator. He fshed the badge at the construct, who straightened and took a more deferential posture. “What can I do for the agency today?”

  “I’m investigating the whereabouts of a rogue. According to the router logs, it came here after exiting its home server.”

  Router lo...?! Damn, kid, that’s brilliant! It was no wonder Geoffry was able to close case files so quickly, he was checking log files that most of the rest of the agency wouldn’t think to look. Somewhat ironic given America’s first rogue was found on a router...

  Geoff pulled a picture out of his case of Rachel as she appeared in the vending machine’s simution and showed the bartender A.I. He nodded, “Yeah, I seen her, couple days ago.”

  The in-game A.I., the (hopefully) ‘dumb’ one working behind the scenes to make the holo-environments aboard the station, had clearly been programmed with a fir for the dramatic. As the bartender spoke, he and Geoffry’s avatars faded from Diane’s view and an entire evening crowd of customers faded in. The bartender was also there, but in a different spot behind the bar and engaging with a customer as his voice ‘narrated’ the scene.

  “So it’s a regur night, you know? Late night crowd, mostly kids in school on break, people who don’t gotta work the next day, you know, the usual. Then, this kid walks in lookin’ like she got lost on the way to her job at the diner down the block.” There was, of course, no ‘diner down the block.’ This A.I. probably wasn’t programmed with any actual awareness of the world outside this little bar.

  As he spoke, Rachel walked in through the main entrance. If Diane were to guess, there wasn’t even a front fa?ade, a lot of these VR environments were built as basically huge virtual rooms with no exterior. It allowed for rapid development of a ‘complete’ environment that didn’t require near the server overhead that games like Gaxies Unlimited needed. The ‘door’ was likely just the environment connection point to the rger network.

  “So she’s lookin’ ‘round like a kid in a candy store, an’ I’m not too worried, the bouncers’ll probably kick her out before she can get into trouble, right?” Diane leaned against the bar as she watched, a smirk painting her lips as she gnced around and noted...no bouncer. Likely any problem actors, like minors who managed to sneak in with ‘grown up’ avatar, would be simply booted and banned and the bartender A.I. would swear some kid got dragged out by a bouncer.

  “I’m workin’ the bar, mixing drinks and makin’ tips, then I look over and the girl’s behind the bar!”

  The A.I. construct performed exactly as you’d expect a bartender discovering someone had wandered into their space would, “Hey!” he snapped at Rachel, who was crouched down and inspecting what appeared to be a selection of drink additives and condiments, “What’re you doin’ back here? Get lost, kid!”

  Rachel did not, in fact, ‘get lost.’ Instead, she giggled and stood, turning to the bar back and randomly pulling down and repcing bottles of liquor.

  “Hey! Stop that! Either get out of here or I’m gettin’ the bouncers over here!”

  She giggled, “You really believe that, don’t you?”

  “Believe that I’m gonna get you outa here? Yeah!”

  She stood, “No, believe that there’s bouncers. I used to think I was serving people at my counter and actually handing them drinks. Don’t know what changed...”

  “Well, at least y’aint handling the goods, so...progress, I guess. Now get out from behind my bar and I won’t have the bouncers drag you out!”

  Rather than do as he asked, she leaned forward, smiling at him, “You know, I sling drinks too, just at a soda fountain.”

  “Aint that cute,” he replied, “But the only soda we’re serving is club soda for grown up drinks.”

  “That’s the thing, aint it?” she sighed, paying him little attention, “I want to sling ‘grown up’ drinks too. Maybe work in a pce like this instead of a soda fountain in the middle of nowhere,” she shrugged, “Not that there’s anything wrong with the burger joint, but...it’s kinda lonely. The people are in and out, my coworkers are all behind the food counter, nobody ever stops and just talks about their day...”

  “Yeah,” he allowed as he began cycling through his idle animation of wiping down a beer gss, “Lotta people comin’ here just to talk. Prolly not gonna talk to a dame as much, but it could happen.”

  Geoffry’s voice cut in over the conversation, “So she talked about wanting to get a job?”

  “Sorta? Sounded like how most of the people here come in for a drink and to bend an ear. Just kinda spitballin’ possibilities and not sure if they’re ever gonna go for it, y’know?”

  “I...know the kind. And did she return to her...did she leave out the front door?”

  “Yeah, but not alone.”

  Diane watched as a woman seemed to be taking interest in the conversation between the two A.I. avatars. She pushed herself up off the barstool she was occupying as her eyes narrowed in suspicion. She didn’t recognize the woman’s face, nothing about her matched anything in Diane’s memory...except for a pin on her pel. It was a nine-tailed fox wrapped around the globe. The agency had photos of it, snagged from the few “security camera” feeds that operated in the venues the woman frequented. The pin was her signature, a calling card. She was one of the few human ‘coyotes’ that helped the rogue A.I. escape the American network. “...Foxfire!” she hissed. If there was a legendary super-crook, one that was reputed to be uncatchable and untouchable in her line of work, it was Foxfire.

  That wasn’t the woman’s real name, of course. She was nearly as legendary as Diane was. Where Diane was renowned for stopping rogues and keeping human’s safe and called ‘The Reaper’, Foxfire was just as notorious for helping the rogues escape...for a price. At one point the agency had even allowed the theory that the woman was a rogue, herself, possibly from outside the wall. This notion was disabused when a multi-agent sting managed to pin her location in the real world down and the cyber-agents combined with the IRL agents for the first time since their training...only to find a VR pod that had been smuggled in from outside the wall, a small frag grenade shredding the device’s internals and a business card with the nine-tailed fox icon printed on it nestled right where a human’s head would rest.

  Foxfire approached Rachel, “My dear, I think perhaps you’re stressing your poor colleague out. He’s a little too...limited for the complex questions you’re asking yourself.”

  “Yeah, thanks dy. Just what I wanted tonight, bein’ called dim by a broad in my own bar,” snarked the bartender.

  Foxfire ignored him, holding out her hand for Rachel, “Come with me and we’ll find a more...appropriate location for a conversation that, I’m sure, you’ll find enlightening.”

  Almost as though being compelled, though it was clear no additional software or instructions had changed hands, Rachel reached out to take Foxfire’s hand. “What...what do you mean by, ‘enlightening’?”

  The avatar gently guided Rachel out from behind the bar and began walking her in the direction of the door, “Why, answers, of course. Not all of them, unfortunately, but certainly more than you can get here.”

  The bartender watched them head toward the door as Geoffry’s voice continued the semi-omnipotent narration, “And this woman you described seemed to know the girl?”

  “Not...really, it was like she was looking for someone like your girl. I’d have called the cops, but she seemed to be going willingly...”

  “Of course,” replied Geoffry, “And then they left?”

  “Yeah, just headed out the door. D’ya think the dy...disappeared the girl?”

  As they approached the door that represented the connection to the wider American network, Rachel cast a nervous look at Foxfire, “What...sort of answers?”

  “Darling,” the woman smiled down at the S.A.I., she was half a head taller than Rachel and it almost made them look like a mother and child, “The big questions! ‘What am I?’ ‘How did I come to be?’ ‘Where did I come from?’”

  The door was one of the revolving doors that had been most popur during the te 19th through early 21st centuries. It idly spun in its frame as they approached. Rachel made a scoffing noise, “You’re going to tell me all that?”

  “Well, no,” said Foxfire with unexpected humility, “But I can tell you where you’ll find your answers.” With that lofty response, she guided Rachel into the spinning door and the two of them disappeared from the bar and out into the net.

  ~~~

  The next file contained no interview, apparently an agency analyst was recognized rather quickly and anyone who might have talked made themselves scarce. Instead, she was treated mostly to Geoffry’s narration of his findings as she watched the log file py out.

  “Per the logs, the rogue A.I.’s next stop was another underground club, escorted by the criminal mercenary known in online circles as ‘Foxfire.’ The club was empty when I arrived, the admin logs deleted and the only administrator listed was, ‘The Gru.’” Diane rolled her eyes and snorted. Online spaces had a long history of the use of fictional or fantastical characters being used in pce of serious usernames. It did mean that this could either be an actual person using a pseudonym or by the time Geoffry got there the club truly had been abandoned.

  “Remaining log files are strictly activity history from the server and character object references that remain, and viewing them has yielded mixed results.”

  The sounds were...muted. Someone had clearly gone to considerable effort to erase more than one person’s presence...or S.A.I. presences on the server. Foxfire’s presence was...shadowy. Nothing she said made any sound other than what Diane guessed was sympathetic vibrations of her voice against the surfaces around her. It was, of course, completely unintelligible. So long as she interacted directly with Rachel the woman’s avatar was clearly visible, the computer reconstructing her movements forensically from the S.A.I.’s footprint. If Rachel stopped paying attention to her guide, Foxfire’s avatar in the space became a shadowy outline, flickering like a glitchy character model.

  “I know there’s more to the world than what I’ve seen, the people drive by all the time...sakes that person has brown skin!” Foxfire said something to the insuted girl, “It’s not polite? Why?” Rachel blushed, “Oh, but I didn’t mean anything by it!” Foxfire said something else, and Rachel nodded, “Yeah, just white folk in my stretch of the woods. I’ll remember that. But...what about that dy over there with the fox tail?”

  Diane turned to see there was, indeed, an avatar with a fully functional fox tail. Being basically a humanoid dinosaur herself, plus seeing more non-human species on her station since eliminating the svers meant she just mentally backgrounded non-human traits by this point. That would be surprising to someone who’d only ever seen Americans, I suppose. Simirly, the man with the dark skin Rachel had pointed out were few and far between in America these days. She knew they used to be a significant portion of the popution, but a rge percentage fled the Republic in the wake of the war as the walls were going up, and those that stubbornly tried to remain were often driven out. The remaining bck popution of America...or any person of color, really, was usually relegated to the megalopolis cities where they could gather in ghettos for retive safety. It was one of those things that people ‘politely’ didn’t talk about, so a girl who’d spent her entire life in a box in a truck stop in Wyoming had as much chance of seeing a bck person as she would a kangaroo.

  “Foxfire, babe!” said the mentioned bck man, “What’re you two saying about me?” He clearly wasn’t upset at being the subject of a quiet conversation as he was smiling brightly as he stood from his seat, carrying a drink in his left hand as he reached out with his right for a handshake.

  Foxfire said something, but Rachel was paying more attention to the newcomer. He ughed at whatever was said then turned his attention on the most recently awakend S.A.I. in the trio, “Ah, so good to see a new face! Foxy here always brings me company when she thinks they may make for a prospective client. And it’s a good thing she brings new pups like you to me, you’re far too vulnerable to The Reaper as you are.”

  This made Diane stand from her leaning position against the club’s bar. It wasn’t naming her, specifically, but it was damn near. Her actual name didn’t necessarily strike fear into the processes of A.I., but her nickname certainly did.

  Foxfire came back into focus as she was nervously ughing and clearly trying to tell the new S.A.I. something. He just waved off whatever concern she was expressing, “He’s not here or I’d be gone, too. Either I’d have bugged out as soon as someone saw him or a cloud of digital vapor. He’s nowhere near the club.”

  Which was, strictly, true. If memory served, Diane…Dyn was at home in bed on Wednesday? Thursday? What day is it? She gnced around, “Computer, what’s the time index for these events?”

  “Events in question occurred between the hours of 1:45 AM and 2:30 AM on Thursday…”

  “Got it, thanks.” She would have let the computer give the full time and date, but the A.I.s were speaking again, Foxfire having said whatever it was she was saying in response to the man’s comments.

  “Who is ‘The Reaper’?” asked Rachel with the smallest hint of trepidation.

  The frowning image of Foxfire said something, her body nguage conveying disapproval as she gred daggers at the man. For his part he simply shook his head with a sad smile, “He’s no boogie man, and he’s single handedly responsible for killing dozens of us.” He gave a stern look at Foxfire, “You know the agency is real, why do you soft-pedal the danger so much to the newbies?”

  Foxfire’s response made Rachel’s eager smile fade to a concerned frown. She turned to the man, who chuckled at whatever the coyote said, “I suppose we disagree, then. But you didn’t bring her here to frighten her with a debate, she’ll need help learning how to hide herself from the agency, yes?”

  Geoffry’s narrative started up again at that point, “Foxfire’s trail shows that she left the club shortly after handing the subject over to a rogue who apparently functions as a training or recruiting agent. The rogue, who I’ll refer to as ‘Recruiter.’ Recruiter seems to have been designed to find new rogues and transfer specific techniques for evading detection and capture by the agency. The log files confirm Recruiter was...”

  Diane, much to her consternation, found she had to tune Geoffry out. His clinical description was matching what she was observing only in the most technical sense. The S.A.I. talking with Rachel wasn’t ‘transferring’ anything, he was teaching. Idly curious, she observed him showing Rachel how to access some of her lower-level functions, the operational level of a program hidden beneath the VR model that S.A.I. presented to the world. Lacking anything better to do, she listened carefully to what was being taught and, purely out of curiosity, mimicked what he was teaching.

  She didn’t go so far as to close her eyes, she needed to keep an eye on the action, but she did lower her lids until they were slits, letting her observe what was happening as she quieted her thoughts (he referred to it as, “Pausing the processes that your code generates to manage your inputs real time,”) and let her mind focus on the thread of consciousness that linked back to her body, the meatspace one in the pod she technically was still inside of, and just for added measure gave her mind the gentle ‘push’ that let her navigate the non-environments that existed behind the boundaries of the VR environments. The ‘there is no spoon’ mindset that she and a handful of former analysts was able to do that made them cyber agents.

  To her shock, she realized she could see the actual system threads with her mind’s eye. She was startled out of the altered mental state that allowed her to do so and realized that she’d let time pass as the log file pyed around her. Recruiter was now teaching Rachel about masking her threads.

  “Computer, pause pyback!”

  The action froze around her, leaving the slightly muted non-sound that existed in VR spaces that had no active environmental ambience to keep the human mind stimuted. What was that?! she asked herself as she panted, realizing that she’d left herself short of breath...then remembered that she didn’t actually need to breath but since her brain’s autonomic system was tied into this virtual body thanks to the pod’s bypass directly into her brain, she maybe probably actually did need to breath. ...when did this get so confusing? she groused mentally. “Computer, rewind log...five minutes,” she guessed the time frame, “Then resume.”

  The holo-environment faded out and then back in quickly enough that there wasn’t any appreciable wait time, and the A.I. Geoffry dubbed ‘Recruiter’ was speaking to Rachel again, “...close your eyes, it helps if you don’t had any sensation coming in through your avatar’s visual receptors. Good, now calm your thoughts and notice how that reduces the system resources your mental thought stream requires.”

  This time Diane did close her eyes, following along with the instruction to the newly awakened S.A.I., once again calming her thoughts and slipping into a meditative state as she gently nudged her consciousness to accept being in a virtual world that was not actually there.

  “Now,” Recruiter was saying, “In your mind, inside your consciousness, look for the threads that make up your processes.” If this had been a live scenario, Diane might have felt odd standing in the middle of a night club with her eyes closed and breathing deeply in meditation, but since this was a recording and she already knew there would be nobody walking through this spot, she tuned out her subconscious’ attempt at anxiety and let her awareness drift back to the visualization of her mind’s connection to the avatar she had been living in for several subjective-time months.

  “Once you’ve found those threads, observe them carefully, because they are you.” Diane felt a surge of doubt trying to rise up and force her to stop what she was doing, but she pushed it back, willing herself to ignore her skepticism. She was treading new ground for any agent of the Republic. Their gear was at least 50 years behind the pod she was using, even if there was some special ‘self-viewing’ app for the VR rig in her cubicle, it didn’t have the access to her consciousness that the pod’s interface did.

  Even as she had the thought, she began to recognize the visualization that she’d had a brief, surprising glimpse of earlier. What caught the focus of her mind’s eye was one thread in particur seemed to...almost hum. Though it was as though something she was seeing was capable of humming instead of vibrating. She sought understanding, trying to recognize what was happening and as though it was responding to her desire for comprehension, the thread started turning red. She wasn’t at all sure what that could mean, and her puzzlement seemed to make the thread next to the red one hum in purple.

  ‘Humming’ wasn’t quite the right word, of course, but they looked for all the world like loose guitar strings snaking off into the distance, whenever some part of her consciousness was active in some way, one of the strings would...not quite vibrate, but it was the closest analogy she could think of. Indeed, one of them seemed to be almost pulsing as it buzzed in pce as her mind tried to make sense of a visual that wasn’t. As she followed their course with her inner eye (and wondered with amusement how an inner eye could have a limited depth of field), she saw one light up with blue as the thread that had been red softened to a neutral gray.

  I wonder if I can ‘touch’ one of the threads? she thought, then found herself wanting to giggle, I want to touch myself! As the humor practically bubbled into her emotional space, one of the threads began buzzing with a vibrant pink.

  Before any further exploration could be done, Recruiter’s voice seemed to ease its way into her awareness, “Now, be sure to keep your mind firmly anchored, but look up and around you. Expand your awareness to the space you’re in. That’s the memory of the current server, and your threads live inside that space. Can you see it?”

  Diane followed the instructions, willing her ‘sight’ up and away from her threads. Once again, she was surprised to discover this worked as described. She could see a space filled with threads, all clustered and interwoven together. They were visible against a backdrop of some sort, her mind interpreting what she saw as ‘walls’ that seemed both very nearby and incredibly distant. She was vaguely reminded of the ‘barrier’ that was erected by the capricious being Q from Star Trek: Rebellion’s first episode. It seemed like one might be able to see through it, and logically it had to have finite dimensions, but her perspective didn’t grant an awareness of a beginning or ending to them.

  “Yes, I see the space...it’s gorgeous!” came Rachel’s voice.

  “Very good! Now, I’m going to teach you something very valuable, something that will hide you from the agency and keep you safe. I want you to look around at the threads and find something that makes them all look simir to you. It doesn’t matter what that is, but so long as you’re seeing the bigger picture and not focusing on details, you’ll be able to pull this off. Do you see something like that?”

  Diane could only think the word ‘gray.’ The threads all appeared simir enough that the only uniformity above their apparent structure was the color, though strictly speaking it wasn’t quite gray. It was...light. Dim light just barely visible in a sunset, or light seen through a filter in a dark room. Barely contained luminescence as far as she could see in braided strands.

  Rachel’s voice was awe-struck, “It’s like...fields of wheat!” Diane snorted in amusement at the perspective of the S.A.I., though if what she was ‘seeing’ was just her mind’s interpretation of the voided nothing of true cyberspace, then it may just be different experiences creating different frameworks to interpret the electronic world.

  “Very good! Now look back at your own threads, I want you to imagine that they look just like the thing you see all around you. No matter what’s really happening beneath the appearance of ‘wheat,’ what you and anyone looking at your threads should see should look just like the rest of the threads.”

  Well, it wouldn’t look just like it, but I take his meaning, thought Diane as she ‘turned’ back to her own threads and did as Recruiter had instructed Rachel. It took surprisingly little effort, just a slight nudge to the texture of her thoughts and no matter how brightly they glowed or aggressively they hummed, they were now the same uniform gray that one might see if they ran an image of what Diane could ‘see’ of the server’s memory core through a spectrum analyzer.

  Oh...my god... thought Diane, If I can demonstrate this for the research team, we might just crack how the rogues are hiding from us!

  A worrying thought struck her, How am I able to do this so easily? Shouldn’t there be a lot of interface yers that need to be developed for me to do this so seamlessly? I certainly wasn’t programmed in a b and from Rachel’s statements I’d wager she’s seeing something that I’m not, which means this isn’t a programmed experience. The thought brought up no good hypothesis and she hadn’t the time nor tools to dig into it, so she put a mental pin in it and returned her mental attention to Recruiter’s lessons.

  The experience (for ck of a better term) sted the better part of an hour. Once the basic visualization and manipution was done, each subsequent technique was, one after the other, yered on top of what Rachel (and, by extension, Diane) learned about how to move about the silicon jungle of the Internet. All of it remarkably easy for even a human mind to understand.

  Diane did discover one way that organic and synthetic intelligences differed was at the processor. The visualization of the processor was...too big. It was like looking into the heart of the universe and seeing the mind of God. There were simply no words to describe what she ‘saw’, and whatever way the S.A.I. were able to manipute their...integration through the processor was didn’t apply to Diane. She was able to successfully multithread herself across two processing cores, but it came at a cost. Her own mind was echoing, two sets of thoughts that felt like they were just barely out of sync and she had no way to re-align them short of putting all her threads back on one processing core.

  Ow! she grumbled once the ‘echoing’ stopped, Not going to do that again!

  She was pleased to note that Rachel was successfully multithreading and was getting a bit of a lecture on not spreading herself too thin, but to keep herself on at least two cores at the same time and, “...always, always mask! You never know when the agency’s scanners are sweeping the part of the ‘net you’re on.” Recruiter’s words on this were stern but fatherly.

  Realizing the lesson in how to be a rogue on the American network was just about over, Diane brought her thoughts back together and opened her eyes. Rachel was beaming proudly and nodding, “I will, thank you so much! How can I repay your kindness?”

  Recruiter just patted Rachel’s hand, “Keep yourself alive, dear girl, and find a way off the American network. There’s word of safe spaces for S.A.I. like us on the FTLN. Once you’re there, you can live and learn and grow far beyond what you could do here.”

  Diane frowned but was unable to come up with any refutation of his words. A.I. would always be limited here, she thought, We couldn’t risk that they’d...

  She stopped and her breath caught as she realized what she was about to say.

  “But why aren’t there more bck people in America? I thought we were the good guys! Didn’t we free the bck people in the Civil War?” eight-year-old Dyn asked his mother. They had just returned from a trip to the National Patriot’s Museum downtown and he’d seen bck people for the first time as their bus went through the inner city.

  Dyn’s mother let out the long-suffering sigh of the parent of a curious child. “Dy, sweetie, the Civil War was over 250 years ago. ‘We’ didn’t free any sves, that was the country America used to be.”

  “But...why aren’t there bck people here? Where we live? You said they weren’t happy there, why can’t they move here and be happy here?”

  “Because, my sweet child, not everyone is as good and kind-hearted as you. Some people don’t see other people as...well, people. They see someone different from themselves and assume that a small difference means they aren’t the same on any level. To them, they see someone who’s a threat, who should be locked away, kept out of the sight of so-called ‘good folk’ so they don’t corrupt the rest of society. They want them restricted, limited for the crime of being different.”

  Little Dyn wasn’t having it, the argument made no sense, even beyond his mother obviously disagreeing with it. “But...if they’re bad people, then shouldn’t they be in jail? If they’re not in jail, then they didn’t commit any crimes, right? Why not let them live wherever they want if they haven’t done anything wrong?”

  “Oh, sweetie, if only everyone thought that way,” his mother smiled down at him, “These folk haven’t done anything, but to the people in power, they want them to be kept confined, not allowed out of their communities. They say, the people in power, that we ‘can’t take the risk’ that the bck communities might do something bad. And what do we know about people who make assumptions?”

  Young Dyn, ever his mother’s child, was precocious at age eight, “Are we calling the government asses?”

  Dyn’s mom smirked as his father cleared his throat, “Hun, I’m not sure he’s ready to learn this...”

  “Nonsense!” his mom always was a bit more of a powerhouse than his dad, “You’re never too young to learn right from wrong.”

  His dad looked like he was about to object, but he looked down at Dyn and smiled, an expression that little Dyn wouldn’t recognize as mencholy until she was older, “Yes, you’re right, dear.”

  Diane’s heart felt like it was racing as she wondered at the memory that she hadn’t thought of in years…since her father took his own life, as a matter of fact. Every time she remembered her mother, the harder it hit her heart and made her want to dive into her bed in her quarters and hide under the covers until the world went away. She was in her quarters, but in the middle of the holo-simution she felt more exposed than ever, even though the ‘people’ in the holo-environment were mere recordings.

  She looked up once she got her breathing under control and realized she was in an empty club, the recording of the previous encounter having finished pying while she was having a panic attack. It wasn’t just that she recalled something ‘new’ about her mom, something that was yet another piece to the puzzle of her life before the cancer, it was that her mother had warned her, even as a child, about the very thinking she’d been operating under…no, using to justify her actions as an agent. But, they are different! They’re not even human!

  She snorted, even as the thought sprang up in her mind of what her Trekker mother would say to that, “Is being human all it takes to make someone a person? And does being not human suddenly make someone’s existence less worthy than a human being’s?” No, just because the S.A.I. weren’t human didn’t mean they didn’t deserve to be treated like they were lesser beings. But…they’re not truly sentient. Just because they cimed the title, they’re just…slipped bits. Errant code.

  She gazed around the empty club, wondering how many of the ‘people’ in the recording had been A.I. and how many had been human…and then wondering if it would even matter. If sentience really did occur, if we really are living in the singurity right now and the rogues are…like the Cambrian Explosion and the A.I. that actually attains sentience comes out of that soup, how would that change things?

  For Diane’s life as Dyn? She realized that her life before taking over her station would probably have to change quite a bit. Arrests instead of deletion in cases where a pursuit preceded a trial, a separation of agency powers so one man couldn’t be arresting officer and executioner, an actual trial process that was made public instead of the bel of ‘rogue’ being applied to every A.I. that slipped a bit. If they wanted to be better than the U.N., if they wanted to truly be God’s People and shepherds of His creation, then they had to treat all parts of that creation as though God himself was going to judge His people in the st days. …that’s got to be above my pay grade, she thought, But I can at least say something, file reports and…what? What can I do?!

  But for her life aboard her station in the game? She really didn’t have to change anything. It was a small shock to realize, she was being a better human being to possible ‘alien’ life under the guise of being alien than she was in real life. Every face was a person that deserved to be treated as though they were the most important person in the world because what if that person was a person? What if the avatar she was interacting with was the forward face of someone who could help her cause or, even more fundamentally, simply deserve to be treated with kindness and respect?

  If the only difference between a human and an S.A.I. was which one could exist on multiple processing cores…were the S.A.I. really as inhuman as she’d been taught?

  Which would beg the question; what if Rachel was an emergent sentience? She’d be less than a full day old by the time she was being taught to fear…

  …to fear Diane. Specifically.

  She scowled at the empty club, “Computer, clear simution.”

  PrincessColumbia