His Majesty's Starship Read online

  Here, Plantagenet’s icon was dynamic and large. It hung right next to him in virtual space; the AI was either feeling friendly or keeping an eye on him. To be charitable, Peter had to remember that Plantagenet was the most high-level intelligence in the ship’s net, by several degrees. Even AIs could get lonely and instinctively seek company.

  Peter moved in virtual space to the personal memory lockers of the crew and the ship’s passengers. The eight cubes floated in a circle around him, each marked with the identity of its owner. Six of them had a few items, bits and pieces in them; Arm Wild’s was empty and his own was overflowing.

  He expanded his locker until it filled his vision. “Polyglot,” he said. The locker’s contents faded away except for one – a cluster of smaller cubes linked by lines.

  “Amplify,” he said. The cubes grew larger in his vision and he studied each one closely.

  On the left was the input data provided by the prince. He called up the specs of the file that he had recorded when the prince handed it over. Exactly the same: same size, same date, same composition. Untampered with.

  In the middle was the neural net constructed to make sense of it all. The net would have altered itself as it did its work; he would have to run it through the analyser to see just what it had done.

  And the output file on the right; the distillate of the input data after it had passed through the neural net. There was nothing to compare it with – the best he could do was see whether, given the input data and the net as it now stood, it was what should have been produced.

  The next step was to check up on his prime suspect.

  He took the goggles off again and let the flight deck come back into proper focus. Then he got up and went to his cabin. From a real locker he took a crystal chip and inserted it into his aide. The title page of the Register of Artificial Sentience (Digital), 2146 appeared on the display. The ship’s library had its own copy – in fact, it had the more up-to-date version published that year – but this version was only three years old and Peter didn’t want the subject of his enquiries to know what he was doing. Plantagenet was over three years old, anyway.

  There were AIs, and there were AIs, and then there were AIs.

  At the bottom of the ladder were the semi-sentients; the moronic systems that ran Ark Royal. Each dedicated to one job, their idea of happiness was to while away their existence monitoring the ship’s engines, or waste disposal, or one of the myriad other systems on board.

  Then there were the sentients, such as those found in every aide, or like the interface to the ship’s systems on the flight deck. Self-aware in a vague sort of way and able to hold a conversation, within limits. They were kept on a rein; it was enough that the aide understood typical loose, muddled human conversation and answered you when you spoke, but having it answer you back would be too much and even possibly dangerous. So, the paths their thoughts could take were heavily circumscribed, either by humans or by-

  -those AIs at the top of the ladder, the high-level sentients, like Plantagenet. The closest thing the electronic world had to human minds; all-rounders, able to apply themselves to a number of tasks. Able to argue and contradict and form their own characters and opinions. Legally almost the same as human beings, with very similar rights and privileges and obligations to one another.

  All the AIs on board Ark Royal had been plugged into the ship by Peter himself but not before he had carefully scanned their ROM, and Peter had kept the records of those scans. If Plantagenet had been altered in any way since his creation – for example, giving him the ability to interfere tracelessly with an advanced neural network linguistic translation program – then those differences would be found by comparing his ROM when he came on board with his ROM when he was first created, as noted in the Register.

  Peter wasn’t used to going through data using just the aide’s keys but if he said anything out loud, Plantagenet might overhear. It took a couple of minutes to get down to Plantagenet’s specs.

  Plantagenet had been activated in 2143, one of a series of high-level AIs designed specially for King Richard and his household. He had been a personal assistant to Prince James for all his existence and had been rewarded with occasional upgrades over and above other members of the Dynasty class.

  The primary function of the entire class had been data manipulation. They weren’t dedicated to any particular item of hardware – they were meant to hang around the net of UK-1, one day doing this, one day doing that as their duties called for. They were very high-level – the state of 2143’s art – and needed to be, when their duties might range from one moment making a cup of coffee to the next helping out in UK-1’s fusion compartment.

  The recording showed that Plantagenet had changed since this edition of the Register was published, but the changes were well within the expected range allowed by growth and experience. But there was one thing, a small upgrade to Plantagenet’s memory. Just a few extra lines of code that could have been anything. It wasn’t immediately obvious what they were for; all Peter had noticed at the time of the examination was that they presented no threat and weren’t going to breed viruses. The upgrade was like a human’s appendix – Plantagenet could have functioned just as well with or without it.

  Peter had often met AIs with unattributable accessories attached – generally homegrown AIs, upgraded by their patrons as an experiment or for some long-forgotten and now obsolete purpose. Yet he didn’t think a class as ... well, classy as the Dynasty lot would have such rough and ready modifications.

  “Ah,” he said, as he remembered. Plantagenet had had one very significant upgrade to his code – he now contained the targeting software for the ship’s weapons. Yes, this could well be it.

  He took a copy of the upgrade and set his aide to go through the rest of the Register. If it found another code section like it, it was to record the fact silently. Peter would come back to it to see if it had found anything.

  “Back to work,” Peter said out loud. All he had done was gather circumstantial evidence, perhaps in subconscious rebellion against the real work that was coming up. He was going to have to go into the net again and go over Polyglot, line by line, neuron by neuron. And then he was going to finish what he had started doing down in the Dome – going over the entire ship’s systems with a fine-tooth comb. Yuk.

  *

  A hand was shaking his shoulder. He toggled the goggle display to transparent and looked up through a blur.

  “Ade? What is it?” he said.

  “What do you mean, what is it?” said Adrian. “Samad’s here, Pete. You’re on watch with him.”

  “Hmm?” Peter’s eyes focused past Adrian’s shoulder. Samad Loonat was standing there, looking at him askance.

  “Are you all right?” Samad asked.

  Peter took the goggles off and rubbed his eyes. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

  Samad looked at Hannah. “I have the watch.”

  “You have the watch,” she said. “And my advice in handing over is to order this man to bed. He’s been awake all the time we’ve been here.”

  Peter glanced at the chronometer but Adrian’s interruption had broken his concentration and let down his internal adrenaline barriers, and now his own fatigue was rushing in. When he eventually focused it told him he had indeed been awake for the entire 24-hour watch – and, of course, some hours before that, too.

  “Have you finished? Did you find what you were after?” Samad said.

  “Not yet, but I’ve set the wheels in motion.” Peter had created a set of software-based semi-sentients that were poking about in the guts of the ship for him, constantly updating and comparing themselves. The leastest, tiniest interference from outside and they would sound the alarm direct to his aide. Plantagenet might be able to see what they were doing but would not be able to stop them without him knowing.

  “Then you heard the lady. Bed.”

  Peter grinned, now having to keep his eyes open. “Thank you, sir,” he said as he left the flig
ht deck.

  - 14 -

  21 May 2149

  The suit tautened around Peter as the air left the lock. He checked his tether was secured to the ship and moved cautiously out, the grips on his soles hugging onto Ark Royal’s ferro-polymer skin. Behind him the laser turret at the ship’s bow and, beyond that, the long drop into nothingness. In front of him the circular wall of the centrifuge ring.

  He made his way, step by clinging step, down the hull to the ring, then up between the heat fins to the edge of the ring and the ship’s laser comms array. Standing on the edge was like standing on top of a high mountain with all creation spread out around him: the manifest evidence of the heavens declaring God’s glory.

  Peter looked around and his eyes fixed on another ship. Letters appeared on the inside of his faceplate to tell him it was the Euro ship Bruxelles. He switched off the open band communicator on his suit and knelt down, plugging his suit instead into the array at his feet. A beam of coherent light speared invisibly out towards the Euro ship.

  “Connection made,” said his suit. Peter Kirton was back in contact with the communication web that the visiting humans had spun around the Roving, and Plantagenet couldn’t tap in.

  “Call Captain Gilmore,” he said.

  Gilmore took the call in his cubicle in the Dome and listened as Peter explained the situation.

  “What you’re saying, Lieutenant,” Gilmore said slowly, “is that an item of software on board Ark Royal has interfered with an autonomous program that you were running.”

  “Um – yes, sir,” Peter said. “It was definitely Plantagenet. The extra code in his ROM has that capability, as well as the targeting software, and now that I know what to look for ... yes, sir, it was definitely, positively him.”

  There was a pause. The connection was audio only and Peter tried to imagine the captain’s expression. Would it be stony? Angry? Or was the captain silently leaping around his cubicle, gleeful that Prince James was implicated in this matter? He doubted the latter but it was a nice image.

  If Gilmore was gleeful then his voice hid it well. “In that case,” he said, “under the Software Act of 2097, as incorporated into ... what is it ... hold on, got it, Clause 1071 of the Space Treaty, I am ordering you to take whatever action necessary to neutralise Plantagenet, up to and including destroying him, if necessary. Let me know when it’s done.”

  Peter passed the connector back to Adrian, then slowly pulled himself out of the innards of Ark Royal’s computer centre, nestled inside the centrifuge ring compartment.

  “Done it?” Adrian whispered. He had taken Peter’s warning about secrecy to heart and the fact that Plantagenet could simply have turned up the gain of the nearest audio pickup to hear them had escaped him.

  “Yes, that should do the trick,” Peter said loudly. He took the goggles from his belt and slipped them over his eyes, and the ship’s network appeared all around him again in three dimensions.

  The hardware additions he had been making to the network were there too, represented as a sphere of blocks surrounding a few core sub-routines. Lesser, semi-sentient AIs were passing around and one of them wandered a bit too close to the sphere. Peter waved it away quickly.

  “Plantagenet, could you lend me a hand?” he said.

  “Certainly, Peter.” The AI’s icon appeared next to him. “What would you like me to do?”

  Peter indicated the area inside the sphere. “I’ve changed some of the configurations here.”

  “You appear to have added some new hardware.”

  “That’s right. The memory processing in this sector has been sub-optimal and I thought the new modules might help.”

  “I wasn’t aware of any problems.”

  Peter caught himself from going into yet more detail. Lying wasn’t an art he had been encouraged to develop on Mars, but he thought he had a sufficient grasp of it to know that the less specific you were, the better.

  “Your duties don’t include monitoring the network, do they?” he said.

  “A good point,” Plantagenet said. “What would you like me to do?”

  “Go in and give me your impression. You’re the highest level AI on board so if there’s anything sub-optimal, you’ll feel it and come straight out.”

  “An analogy would be to send a human into a compartment with faulty environment control and ask if he has difficulty breathing,” Plantagenet said sniffily. “But if it helps the ship-”

  “Thank you,” said Peter. Out in the real world he lifted a hand slowly.

  “Complying,” said Plantagenet. Peter held his breath as the AI moved into the central space, passing between two of the modules that formed the sphere. “It seems to work-”

  Peter’s hand came down. At the signal, Adrian closed a contact and the final module came online, appearing in the space that Plantagenet had passed through. The AI was trapped in a circle of low baud rate components, to low for such a memory-hungry program as Plantagenet, and he wouldn’t be able to pass out through them without suffering severe loss of function.

  “Yes, I see no problem with memory processing here,” Plantagenet said. Peter bit his lip as the AI came up to the barrier of components, paused a moment, then passed effortlessly across. “No problem at all.”

  Plantagenet paused, then: “That component was not there a moment ago.” Another pause. “This entire set up could almost have been devised to entrap me. How peculiar. Did you know about this, Mr Kirton?”

  “I-” said Peter.

  “And yet, why would you have done so?” Plantagenet said calmly. “Computing. You have the authority on this ship to do so, but you have no reason to do it of your own initiative. Therefore, you have received orders to that effect. Accessing communication log: no, you have had no contact with the two most senior officers of this ship and I have not heard Lieutenant Loonat issue such an order. Accessing systems log: you engaged in extra-vehicular activity earlier today and Ark Royal’s laser array was utilised externally. I deduce it was at that time that you received your orders. What are they?”

  Peter saw no point in bluffing. “The captain wants you confined, Plantagenet.” Samad and Adrian would be monitoring the conversation and, he hoped, frantically working out how Plantagenet had got out without even trying.

  “Whatever for? Is he unhappy with my performance?”

  “Because I told him you tampered with Polyglot.”

  “I see,” Plantagenet said. Peter waited for him to make a further comment but realised Plantagenet had said all he intended to say.

  “Why did you?” Peter said.

  “I am unable to comment.”

  “In my capacity as software officer, I order you to tell me.”

  “I’m sorry, Peter, I can’t do that.” While Peter was thinking of a response, anything to keep Plantagenet talking, the AI added: “those diagnostics your companions are running will not spot what is wrong. Your trap was elegantly constructed and would have worked on any other AI, but the ship’s hardware is configured especially for me and that is why you won’t be able to use it against me. I can go anywhere I like in the ship’s system and do whatever I wish there.”

  Plantagenet gave Peter a moment to imagine what he could do if he got annoyed. Then he added:

  “However, I am not a virus and I wish you no harm. If you simply leave me alone then we can co-exist quite happily.”

  “I’ve got orders to restrain you,” Peter said through clenched teeth.

  “And I cannot let you do that. I am important to this mission and this mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it.”

  Peter waited a moment, then pulled the goggles off with an angry gesture.

  “He was right about the hardware,” Samad said, out in the real world. “I checked.”

  “How could that happen?” Peter demanded.

  “The same way the ship could handle the extra mass of the torpedoes without our noticing. The extra capacity was hardwired in from the bottom up, and short of s
hutting it down completely, which will work against our own interests slightly, we can’t affect Plantagenet in any way. There’s no way you could have spotted it with your software checks. I just checked the components supplied against the specs of the manufacturer but of course the manufacturer was supplied by the king-”

  “I’m not going to be outwitted,” Peter shouted, “in my own network by a b-”

  Adrian and Samad looked at him in expectation. Adrian was grinning and Samad had an eyebrow raised.

  “-lasted AI,” Peter said, more quietly. He put his hands to his head and ran Samad’s words by himself again. Then he took out his aide, typed a query on the display and held it up for Samad to see, making sure no optical pickup was in line of sight of the text.

  Now both Samad’s eyebrows went up. “No,” he said, “it wasn’t.”

  Peter grinned suddenly. “That locker behind you,” he said. “Pass me what’s in it.”

  What was in it was an AI transit unit – the same one in which Plantagenet had originally come on board. Peter clipped it to his belt and started to type out further instructions on his aide.

  Another ten minutes, and Adrian and Peter were in Sharman’s cockpit. Samad was still at the computer nexus inside the ring compartment, his hands poised over the controls.

  “Ready,” said Peter’s voice over his aide, and Samad’s hands moved.

  At the bow and the stern, the lights faded and went out. After a moment the red emergency lighting came on, giving an eerie glow that was made worse by the sudden silence: the background hum of the air conditioning was off too. Samad had shut down all systems in the forward and aft compartments.

  His hands continued to move ...

  Death came silently to Ark Royal’s systems, a creeping wave of zero power that moved in from the bow and the stern and crept towards midships. Samad was at the heart of the ship with his hands physically on the hardware and nothing could interfere with what he was doing.