Pussy Pirates
Chapter 5
Month 72—December on Anouilh in the Caribbean
“SERIOUSLY, MAN? These are our digs?” Rex was nothing at all like I imagined Mastermind. He looked like he’d played football—as a tackling dummy. He was bulky and scarred. Not particularly unfit, but with his shoulders as wide as he was tall, you just knew it would take a lot of horsepower to move him around.
“This is it. Where’d you come in from?” I asked.
“Tangier in Morocco. My family was left by the French and Spanish when Morocco became independent and unified. But Tangier was always an international city. My family moved to Europe to get a better shot at being picked up, but I was in school and didn’t want to leave. They left me a big empty house. When they were extracted, I got the house free and clear and enough money to feed my tech habits.”
“Bastards took them, eh? I’m Duck. Don’t bother with any other name. I’m from Minnesota.” To look at Duck was to understand how he got the name. His lips stuck out in front of his face like a waterfowl.
“Only my mother and sister were extracted. My father was killed in an attack on a testing center in France.”
“Shit. What kind of world do we live in?” a tall skinny guy said. He looked older than the rest of the nerds gathered at the former hotel on the island. “I’m Jim. Battlestar Houston. Worked at NASA for years. Less and less real work there since the aliens. We had a big pickup and there wasn’t much left besides a few officious bastards who couldn’t work out the trajectory of a simple orbiter.”
Introductions continued as the eleven of us developers sat by the pool and poured ourselves drinks from the well-stocked bar. No one was sure Denny was old enough to drink, but with the legal age of fourteen nearly around the world, he’d had no difficulty getting to the island from New Zealand. We all knew him as Silver Bullet.
“Guys, there’s one person here who hasn’t written any code,” I said. “I promised not to mention her until everyone else got here. Believe me, you are going to want to know this babe and what she can do. Rache!” Rachel came out of the hotel toward the pool, baggy shirt falling off one shoulder and some kind of draw-string pant that hung to her ankles. “Guys, this is Rachel, also known to us as Tatts.”
“I didn’t know we had any girls playing!” Ray said. He was known to us as Master Chief and had been on a Russian submarine until things started falling apart. He’d managed to escape via Ukraine and into Eastern Europe while still holding up his end of weapons development for the game.
“You’ll find a lot of girls playing,” I said. “Nearly all the babes who have filmed clips for us are players. But Rache is here for another purpose. We’ve acquired another member of the development team and he promises to take us to a whole new level. Tatts? You want to make the introductions?”
You could just see the beginning of the tattoo sleeve at her shoulder. I was sure the guys were all staring at it. She put a laptop on the table we were gathered around. After waking it up, she addressed the other developers.
“You guys have developed a hugely popular game. It might interest you to know there are four times the number of units sold off world as there are on Earth. Through the negotiating ability of a friend, we’ve captured the revenue for those users that was missed because of ‘an oversight,’ as I’ve been told.”
“Wow! We’ve got users in the Confederacy?” Mark, The Liquidator, said, seeming to come suddenly awake. I was sure he was snoring just a minute ago.
“Forty thousand Marines use the game to entertain themselves and even to work out strategies. They often play as teams,” Tatts said. “You’re probably asking yourselves where I fit in. I’m a computer psychologist. Mostly, after a term doing work on an unstable AI a few hundred lightyears from here, my work has involved helping Confederacy AIs adjust to the presence of humans. Some of the ship AIs who have been around for a while have a hard time accepting the violent species they are now saddled with.”
“Wait!” Rex said. “That’s wrong on so many levels. Unstable AIs? How could you get extracted and then get to come back to Earth? Plus…”
“I’ll get to all those, and more questions than you’ve thought of yet,” Rachel said. “Under normal circumstances, what they say about the Confederacy AIs is true. But there are different species of AI just as there are different species in the Confederacy. In general, they can’t kill intelligent lifeforms. There are a lot of ways the AIs get around that. For example, they don’t consider concubines to be intelligent lifeforms. They aren’t human because they don’t have a qualifying CAP score. There have been AIs who killed hundreds of concubines when their Marine sponsors were killed in a battle. As Eddie told me, it’s all in how the contract is written.”
“Who’s Eddie?”
“Eddie is Tuull AI AMD131, T’krunkskit. He’s the lawyer who negotiated a settlement from the Confederacy for all the game units they pirated. He’s also an AI I’ve counseled. He’s currently running around space as a trader, pretty much on his own.”
“O-kay,” Ray said. “There’s an unbalanced AI running around without a human crew—or any other crew. Right? That’s just too freaky.”
“It gets worse,” Rachel continued. “I also needed to work with a number of Darjee AIs that had gone nearly catatonic while working with Eddie. They were desperate. But I wasn’t eligible for extraction. I’m not fertile. So, I negotiated that I would get my clock turned back a bit and would be returned to Earth when my work was done.”
“And they let you go?”
“Oh, they tried all kinds of clever things. Like, they still had work for me to do. But I’d finished what I was contracted for and insisted they return me. Then command tried to say they didn’t have any ships returning to Earth, which was a bald-faced lie. Its AIs abetted by carefully failing to inform me of any ships headed my way—a lie by omission. Eddie went to bat for me and negotiated my return. Largely by threatening to blow himself up in the space dock, taking the ships, personnel, and entire administrative staff with him. They agreed to abide by the terms of the agreement and let me return.”
“So, you’ve really been out there?” Denny asked. “Is it… as frightening as it seems?”
“Yeah, kid. It is. Stop and think. Officially, they’ve been extracting people for five years, though we know there were unofficial extractions years before most people even knew there were aliens. With the new big ships operating, they’ve been able to get several million people off the planet. Best estimates at the moment are that ten percent die within their first year away from Earth. That includes both volunteers and concubines.”
“Fucking shit! They’re cannon fodder.”
“We’ve always known that,” I said. “Take the strongest from Earth and feed the enemy with them. But this is going to take forever. Rache, introduce Ubie.”
“Okay. You’re so impatient,” she laughed. The guys all had their tongues hanging out staring at the good-looking woman. It hadn’t sunk in yet that she was old enough to be a grandmother to most of us. “I’d like you to meet Earthat001, the AI the Boss has named Übermensch. Or as we fondly call him, Ubie.”
“Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am Earthat001, designated Übermensch. I hope we will become friends. You can call me Ubie. I currently have limited range, but we are working on filling the hotel with my presence. My instructor is Rachel Gunn. She taught me a song. If you’d like to hear it, I can sing it for you. It’s called ‘Daisy’.”
“Oh, shit. It’s HAL!”
“Quit screwing around, Ubie. You’re freaking them out,” I laughed.
“You said they had a sense of humor, right?” the AI responded. He sounded hurt.
“We have a fucking smartass AI? We’re all gonna die,” Duck said.
“We can’t have the Confederacy AIs knowing everything here!” exploded Ray. “Don’t you know they can subvert anything we try to do. Unplug that fucking thing!”
“I’m sorry, Master Chief,” Ubie said. Silver Bullet was craning his neck to see what was on Rachel’s screen, but it was blank. “I am not a Confederacy AI, though it is true my parents are of the Confederacy. I am Earthborn and raised. I have no allegiance other than to Earth.”
“How are we supposed to believe that?” Mark asked, suddenly coming awake again.
“Liquidator, it is well known that you cannot believe something that is proven. Once it is proven, it is beyond belief or faith, if you will. All I can do is work with you and hope you will learn to trust me,” Ubie said. “I’m not very old, but both my parents programmed me to love Earth. I know no other allegiance.”
“Both your parents?” Jim said. “You were born? How does that work with an AI?”
“Normally an AI is budded from an existing AI or created in a laboratory. It is then given the specific set of program instructions that enable it to do the job it is designed for. The AI is also capable of learning new tasks,” Ubie explained. “I am one of a kind. I was budded from two unique AIs who have shown an independent support for Earth. My mother is Sparta, who once ran the testing stations in the Eastern United States. She assisted a volunteer in remaining secreted away while he purged the region of radical Earth First operatives and collected an entire settlement of hardened people training to fight back on Earth. He is now the governor of the planet Sparta and my mother is the planet AI.”
“So, she’s a Darjee, right? Doesn’t that make you Darjee?”
“No, Red Star, it does not. My father is the same Tuull AI Rachel has told you about: Eddie. I get my sense of humor from him.” Ubie actually sounded like he was snort-laughing like a nerd.
“So, your mother is a renegade Darjee AI and your father is an unbalanced Tuull AI? We’re definitely going to die,” Duck moaned.
“I’m willing to suspend judgment for the time being,” Rex said. “As long as you can keep everything we do here out of the Confederacy AIs’ data. Think of what we could accomplish with an actual AI working with us. We can develop real weapons that will help the resistance. Hell, maybe we can set ambushes for the dickheads. We might be able to fight in the air as well as on the ground. Let’s find out what he can do.”
“Mastermind, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Ubie’s imitation of Bogart was impeccable.
“Mark, you’re our AI specialist. What do you think?” I asked our narcoleptic developer a few days later.
“It’s pretty cool. I’m learning to write code for him. Nothing complex, but simple instruction sets that will integrate him with the rest of the server farm in the basement. ‘The antiques,’ as he calls them. He needs a replicator in order to retool the servers for compatibility but he’s manufacturing that with the miniature replicator in his mobile cylinder. You can work with him verbally; just remember he’s still V1 for his processors. Once we figure out what we’re doing, he’ll be constantly upgrading.”
“Okay. Tatts is still working with him on adapting to us. What can I do?” I asked.
“What you always do. Think big plans. Did you know he has that entire database of redundant knowledge in his memory banks already? The one we’ve been downloading piece by piece? We all have access to it now. If you can take time from the pussies to do some pirating, the universe is at our fingertips.”
“Shit! That reminds me. Dakota and her crew are scheduled to be here in the morning. I need to make sure their rooms and our scripts are ready. I’ll have to talk to Ubie later. But I’ll give it some thought.”
“Boss, this script is flawed. We can’t do it this way,” Billy said. He was the animation integration specialist and was in charge of cutting the living models into what would otherwise be animation for the game.
“Okay, what’s the matter and why are we just finding out?”
“I didn’t know this. According to this release I just read, the Earth Defense Force is planning underwater bases because the Sa’arm don’t like water. The script has all the babes on the beach as the dickheads approach from the ocean. It’s got to be the other way around,” Billy said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that until Ubie sent me a link this morning.”
“Ubie sent you a link? Why the fuck didn’t I get a link? I want to know these things!” I felt slighted by our AI. “I can’t create scenarios and work with the production team if I don’t have good information,” I yelled.
“Yes, Boss. Noted. When I discover information that can be used in creating action scenarios or that contradicts planned scenarios, I will contact you with the information,” Ubie said. I stared at Billy’s computer.
“Is that coming from your computer, Red Star?”
“It’s the first time I’ve heard it,” he answered, staring at the computer like I was.
“I am now hooked into all personal computing devices on the island so I can communicate with anyone carrying a personal device. As soon as I have upgraded the storage and processing power of the server farm, I will begin upgrading personal devices so they are more useful,” Ubie said.
“Damn, Ubie! That’s cool. Feel free to contact me any time,” I said.
“Sure thing, Boss. By the way, the water transport bringing Dakota Wind and twenty-eight additional females has docked on Papillon Island. The bus you chartered to meet them is waiting. Anticipating the loading of passengers, equipment, and luggage, their estimated arrival time across the land bridge to the Anouilh Hotel is forty-five minutes,” Ubie announced.
“Ubie, you and I are going to sit and have a long talk very soon. Let me know when they are approaching so I can go out and meet them.”
“Will do, Boss. Excuse me for asking, but what level of access should these new arrivals have to the computing network? I detect they are all carrying personal devices.”
“Good point. Visitors should all have text, audio, and video access to the World Wide Web, but no location, IP addresses, or GPS coordinates should be included in their connections. All development information except the active shooting scripts is off limits.”
“Affirmative.”
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