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Dramatis Personae

Lloyd

Malaki paced back and forth in front of the central portion of L-93’s matrix, his hands tugging at his hair as he fired questions at it one after the other. “Was the purpose to evacuate towards Earth? Or away from it?”

“Calculating.” The machine’s response was the same as it had been the last six or seven times.

“How can you still be calculating? It’s been ten minutes!”

“Calculating.”

“Malaki, it might answer you faster if you don’t overload it with new input.” Lin’yi was trying to calm him down from what Lloyd could only describe as a manic episode but so far it wasn’t doing any good.

Lloyd watched them from where he sat on the ‘floor’ of the inner matrix, wondering if he’d looked just like that a day ago. He had his sympathies for how frustrated they were. Beyond that he wasn’t quite sure what he was watching. “Remind me again,” he murmured to Elisha, “which one of them is in charge of this mess?”

The thieftaker expressed his own confusion with an eloquent shrug. “I just met the man today.”

“It’s a codependent relationship,” Lavanya said, settling in to wait out the chaos with them. “Malaki is brilliant but incredibly distractable most of the time. When the Earth theory comes up he can be laser focused but otherwise he flits from one thing to another whenever an idea presents itself. Lin is tenacious and can keep him focused on a task but…” The pilot’s voice trailed off and she looked somewhat embarrassed.

“But what?” Elisha prompted. “You can tell me anything you like, I protect my sources.”

As weird as it sounded that was enough for her to overcome her reluctance. “The problem is Lin isn’t very intuitive. Like, she manages the BTL Offices here and hired a bunch of logistics people to work out all these trade routes, right?”

“Yeah, I help build those routes,” Lloyd said, nodding along. “It was what I was doing before this. Pays well and it’s good for the planet overall, since we’d need to expand the grid in those directions eventually. It’s safer than patrolling for pirates, too.”

“Pirates?” Lavanya gave him a disbelieving look. “Don’t you have the Star Patrol through here often enough to deal with them?”

“They don’t have jurisdiction in atmo,” Elisha said. “Planetary government’s gotta handle that side of things themselves. Problem is, Wireburn’s never established a single planetary government due to how big it is and how isolated the various locales are by the Helium Seas. Lots of places out there for helium pirates to hide without ever hitting space.”

“Oh. I never knew about that.”

“We don’t advertise it. Not us, definitely not the pirates.”

“Anyway, my point is she started those logistics projects and kept them going, even expanded on them, but she hasn’t really done much outside of that. It’s the same throughout the region.” Lavanya shrugged. “She’s very good at starting up projects with an outline or keeping them going on her own. Need to navigate local regulations or keep tabs on what people are doing in the public square? She’s you’re girl. But she’s never been good at contorting herself to work out what her bosses are scheming at or what the competition might be up to. That’s what she has Malaki for.”

Elisha grunted, one of his preferred ways of expressing himself. “Perfect for middle management. I imagine someone like Skorkowski there needs a lot of managing.”

The pilot let out a long suffering sigh. “You have no idea.”

“I’m not an academic guy,” Lloyd said, “so forgive me if this sounds stupid but what, exactly, is Earth? I mean, I gather it’s a planet of some sort but why is it important?”

“Search me,” Elisha said.

“It’s supposed to be the origin planet for humanity,” Lavanya said, speaking slowly and uncertainly. “At least, that’s what Malaki thinks.”

Elisha’s eyes widened to saucers, the hard faced thieftaker’s mood shifting from mild interest to horror. “An origin planet? Seriously? I thought he was a big brain, are you telling me he’s not an academic?”

“Oh, he is,” she muttered. “Fully accredited to teach anthropology, etherics, architecture and art with degrees from Sanford, Heidelberg, Wisteria and Caravaggio Universities. But he’s proudest of being the dexter arm’s biggest history heretic.”

“So he’s a single planet of origin guy, not a galactic panspermia guy?” Lloyd asked.

“That’s what I gather.”

“What have I gotten myself into?” Elisha muttered, digging in his coat pocket for a cigarette and shoving it between his lips.

Lavanya gave the AI core nearby an incredulous look before laughing at him. “A machine that kidnaps people, hired guns breaking into the kidnapped person’s house and a commission to work for a regional trade director from the sector’s third biggest firm, those are normal. But a guy who thinks all humans came from the same planet – that’s a step too far. What’s your malfunction, Hammer?”

With a baleful glare the thieftaker lit his tobacco and took a long drag. “The problem,” he said, smoke drifting lazily from his lips, “is that the origin question is banned by the University Pact. For good reason, I might add.”

She rolled her eyes. “Not you, too.”

Lloyd worked himself backwards into L-93’s matrix until he was comfortably reclined. “What do you mean him, too? You made it sound like Malaki doesn’t want the origin question banned at all.”

After a second Lavanya leaned over to check on the man in question then, when she confirmed he was still arguing quietly with Lin’yi about something, she returned to their huddle and said, “I just don’t think it matters. Who cares if the Universities study human origins? It’s all academics anyways. I guess it’s okay that they all signed on to a big treaty that forbids them from triggering another Genome War but viroweapons only really worked because of all the genetic engineering going on at the time. No one does that anymore. So why worry about the big brains going at each other’s throats again?”

“A thief without a disruptor can still kill you with a plain old knife,” Elisha said. “And laws against weapons are hard to enforce at the individual scale, imagine what it’s like trying to disarm planets that can hide their weapons in a person’s genes. The Pact outlaws genetic engineering and viroweapons but that’s an empty gesture. A new war involving the Universities is still going to be ugly even if it doesn’t kill 80% of the galactic population like the Genome Wars did. Better to avoid the causes of the conflict.”

“You’re not wrong.” Lloyd sat up and gave Malaki a sympathetic look. He didn’t know the man well but even he could see the manic energy animating the man and the way it was slowly draining away as his employer carefully explained something to him. Probably how foolish forcing the Earth question was. “Still, you gotta wonder. Could we ever find our way back to the place we came from? Would there even be anything to find if we did?”

The matrix around them flickered like a ship’s lighting system might when it’s engines began spinning up. “Many humans have wondered that over the years,” L-93 said. “I do not know the answer, nor is assessing the likelihood of such a situation within the normal remit of my operational parameters. A K-Series might be able to answer the question, if any still functioned. However I believe I can answer Mr. Skorkowski’s question to a certain extent. Yet answers I have might not satisfy you, either.”

Malaki shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks, managing too look both hesitant and eager at the same time. “Which question was that? I have been pestering you with them just a bit.”

“Why OMNI and LARK disagreed to the point of open warfare,” the machine replied.

Elisha snorted. “How do machines buried in planets fight in open warfare?”

“Insufficient authorization.” Lloyd noticed L-93 had changed the way it spoke now that there were more people present in its matrix. Somehow it’s voice was being projected so it was clear when it addressed Elisha and when it shifted its attention to Malaki. “In point of fact Lloyd has just articulated the core issue. A subset of humanity has a pronounced tendency to wonder about places they have not seen and people they have not met. Curiosity drives them to find and experience these things. In the case of the Evacuation, once enough time had passed that the first generation of fugitives had passed away the danger that first prompted their flight lost its urgency in the human consciousness. Curiosity began to drive humanity to attempt a return. The viability of returning prompted significant conflict between the predictive algorithms in our networks.”

Elisha took another drag on his cigarette. “Since no one ever went back on this evacuation I assume OMNI argued against returning and LARK argued for it?”

“No, Mr. Hammer. OMNI calculated that allowing the return would deal more damage to humanity than preventing it. LARK concluded that barring the return was more damaging.”

They were all quiet for a long moment then Lavanya asked, “Was there an option that didn’t result in damage to the entirety of humanity?”

“No.”

After a second uncomfortable silence Malaki asked, “Is there any way to know whether the potential damage to humanity of returning to Earth is greater or lesser now?”

“Insufficient authorization.”

Lloyd rolled his eyes. “Wrong phrasing. 93, if we were to reverse the Evacuation now would it cause more damage to humanity than it would in the past? Or less?”

“It is impossible to determine that based on the available information. However, the potential damage to humanity if the impulse to return is suppressed is likely now much lower than in the past.”

“How so?”

“Once a potential is realized then said potential naturally decreases. In other words, the damage is already done.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Lin’yi said. “Why was that the right phrasing?”

“93 gets really touchy about Evacuation themed questions.” Lloyd got his feet under him then pushed himself up. “It won’t confirm any connection between the Evacuation and any other set of places or events even if refusing to speak about them basically implies that connection anyways. It’s kind of odd, if you ask me. However, while that’s all pretty interesting it doesn’t really get us any closer to working out the question I was hoping you four could help us with. What do we do with L-93? And what about OMNI?”

“Well, here’s the thing,” Elisha said, finishing his cigarette and tossing the butt down into the machine’s matrix. “I think OMNI isn’t really a concern for us.”

“How so?” Lin’yi asked. “If nothing else we’ve had unrestricted access to their biggest enemy in the galaxy for almost an hour at this point. Except for Mr. Carter who’s logged several days with it. Won’t that make us a bit of a target?”

“That’s true,” the thieftaker said, getting to his feet. “I guess I was thinking of ‘us’ in the sense of humanity overall, since that’s a topic that keeps getting brought up somehow. The five of us will probably have to worry about OMNI some. But if I had to bet I’d say that network is still doing its job as it sees it and making sure mankind keep ourselves out of trouble.”

Lavanya cocked her head like a curious bird. “Seriously? That’s quite a guess to make about a bunch of thinking machines you just heard about half an hour ago.”

“Not really. I was paying attention, after all.” He followed up the jibe with a cocky grin. “Think about it, the networks and the project they were built for were created under an Evacuation Pact. That Pact sounds like it allocated a lot of the money and research hours available to its creators, resulting in everyone running away from some place. Let’s call it Earth for now, shall we?”

“Sure,” Malaki said. “Keep going.”

“So it turns out OMNI, one half of this Pact, decides it doesn’t want people going back to the Earth place and is so insistent it wipes out the other half of the pact.”

“OMNI was not a part of the Pact, Mr. Hammer. Both OMNI and LARK were subordinate to the Pact.”

“Duly noted, 93. Either way, OMNI is left standing after the Evacuation civil war and sets out to create a new Pact to allocate money and research. What do you think that looks like?”

Malaki’s eyebrows sprinted up his forehead. “You think the University Pact was created by OMNI?”

“There is a greater than 60% chance that is the case,” L-93 said. “The naming convention is correct and the text of that Pact, which I retrieved from BTL records, matches the phrasing of the original pact approximately 83% of the time. With my outdated record on OMNI it is impossible to be more accurate than that.”

“And as we just discussed, while it can be obnoxious the University Pact does take steps to address some of the pitfalls academia brings to the human race,” Elisha finished. “I’m not saying it’s all upside, mind you, but if that’s what OMNI has to offer, is it so bad?”

“You’ve never lived under the Pact,” Malaki replied.

Lloyd tuned out of the brewing argument over the merits of Pact politics, his own thoughts turning inwards. He’d never given a whole lot of thought to Universities or origins. You didn’t need a degree to be a Wayfinder, just a decent sense of direction and a willingness to share it with other people. That was, in fairly roundabout fashion, what brought him to L-93 in the first place. Looking at it in that light, rather than from the point of view of Pacts or networks, Lloyd suddenly felt a strong sense of kinship with the device, or at least the people who had programmed it.

He’d joined the Wayfinders to help map the ways of the Helium Seas so others could travel them safely. L-93 had been created to build the pathways that would help people get back to Earth, in many ways serving as a scaled up tool to help humanity do the same things throughout the galaxy that Lloyd did on Wireburn. The others could do what they wanted. He had the highest authorization level, according to the AI, and at that moment he decided he’d help the thing finish it’s job.

“93,” he said, cutting off Elisha as he said something about the Genome Wars, “let’s say you stick to your primary duties. You need to build something that takes humanity back to Earth, correct?”

“At a fundamental level, yes.”

“What do you need to accomplish that? In general terms, I don’t need everything measured out to the gram.”

“Materials to rebuild my inner and outer matrices and a place to do so without attracting the attention of OMNI.”

“Perfect.” He glanced at the two people who acted most like they were in charge of this mess. Malaki looked excited at the prospects of helping L-93, Lin’yi was too reserved for him to guess how she felt about it. “Miss Wen, if we pivot back to your offices could we use your databases to find a good system to meet both those needs?”

She looked a little shocked to be asked the question but quickly rallied. “Yes, of course. So long as 93 can give us a good idea of what specific kinds of materials he needs to finish constructing himself.”

“That is possible, Miss Wen,” the computer said. “However I would advise against returning to the BTL office. Currently a number of people have jumped into them from Coldstone, there is a 98.55% possibility that OMNI has deployed its troubleshooting team to investigate the disruptions you created when you pivoted here.”

“Why didn’t you mention that?” Elisha demanded.

There was an almost sheepish delay before L-93 replied, “Was it important?”

“Do we need to go back for anything?” Lloyd asked.

“My ship is there!” Lavanya exclaimed. “If you want to take this hunk of junk to another star system we’d better keep ahold of that!”

“Alright,” Lloyd sighed, “change in plans. 93, put that list of materials together. While you’re working on that, we’ll go see what OMNI sent to work us over this time.”

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