Humanist

by RDSouth

This is a Culture prequel, set about 8000 years before Consider Phlebas.

Humanist

Robert David South

"This is a Science mission," I pointed out.

"Fuel use is a Prosperity matter," the supply officer insisted.

"We'll be fine. There's plenty enough to get us back to Mara. And the extra expenditure is justified. Nobody could have known it was spinning so fast."

"Science couldn't have been expected to know that, no, how would they know? As allowed under the charter for interdepartmental councils I'm invoking over ride."

"We won't have another chance," I reminded everyone, pulling out a laser pistol. It whined audibly as it powered up. "That brown dwarf is disrupting this whole region."

"Sending comets into the inner system. As a civilization, we don't have more resources to spare on this 'archeology'. Culture died a thousand years ago, anything they had is obsolete."

My laser pistol made a little ding noise to let me know it was now ready for action. At the hint of a threat, the sergeant at arms unfolded itself, erecting shimmering force shields around me, protecting all others on the bridge. It extended claws to poise over my main manipulator, which gripped the pistol aimed safely at an unused monitor.

"War will not allow decision by force. War department policy in matters of interdepartmental conflict is to defer to Order."

At that, the Captain swiveled to face us, glowing slightly. "The expenditure is justified. The laser is not. Confine our Science officer to quarters."

They confined me to quarters, but of course that was a minor inconvenience. The good ship Humanitarian was full of my motes, giving me a good picture of everything. I could no longer physically participate in official Interdepartmental Councils so my section appointed a drone to represent me. Officially it had a Grade 3 AI, sufficient to take notes and parrot the boss's talking points, but I had it hollowed out. It was little but a glove for my hand.

By this time the artificiality of the "comet" was clear on the bridge display screen. We had known it was artificial, and theoretically we could have imaged in greater detail much earlier, but nobody was willing to waste the necessary detector array out on what was essentially a scavenger mission. Lots of stuff out here was artificial, and most of it was degraded old scrap from before the Department War. In the run up, every department had stashed secret labs and survival caches and continuity-of-government pods out here. They had known war was coming, and they had known it would be touch and go, anybodies to win. The speed of technological progress, accelerating even then, could reverse fortunes instantly. In the event, factions that were on the ropes one moment often did surge to dominance the next. The war had been long burning and volatile until Order was established, and now we had the Departmental Cooperation Compact.

I watched the bickering officers through the drone's sensors, then I watched the drone from a mote-view composite. It hovered over my old seat magnetically, a squarish box about the size of an old CPU case, except with stylized spikes extending up from each corner where the old propellers would have been. The props were vestigial, now that we had room temperature superconduction, but levitating was a necessary formality, a legal control. AI Drones were kept limited by the requirement that they be able to fly. There was only so much space for brains once you put in a power supply and motors, because you had to keep weight down. Bird brained drones would not be taking over because they could only get so smart.

This one was dumber than most, an authentic drone in the original sense of the word: just a remote controlled puppet. I would be present at the council meeting. In fact my drone had just been asked a question.

"What we're getting from the station's remaining automation indicates that it was an AI lab, and everything confirms that it was under the control of Culture," I-or rather, my drone—reported.

"Culture," the Supply Officer harrumphed. They won't be claiming any property."

"Public domain," the Captain agreed. "Since the Culture department was wiped out in the war, this station and everything on it are free for the taking."

"How about defenses?" asked the Sergeant at Arms. "Can we take it?"

"It's shielding is good enough that we can't see far inside. But we know it's pre war tech. The main offensive weaponry is guided missiles. Those are slow, and we can jam or spoof the control signal. It will have defensive lasers that we could easily shield against if we wanted to send in missiles. But if we wanted to destroy the damn thing we could take it out with one of our nukes."

"It's a sitting duck."

"Well, spinning," I commented through my drone, " It's spinning at a good clip. Sitting and spinning. It's fifty kilometers in diameter and doesn't fly apart, so it must be made of foam, which we know it isn't, or it must be reinforced by bands of continuous carbon nanotube. For some reason the builders wanted spin gravity inside, but this is extreme. Spin gravity at the equator is several times that of Mora."

"And we're not all from Mora. Most of us are used to less gravity. Can we slow it down before we board?"

"I think not." piped up Prosperity.

"I concur," Order concurred.

"So we match courses with its spin."

"Why don't we send the shuttle to match? Just a small boarding party."

"We've been over this. The shuttle is just for transferring crew between larger craft that are on matched courses. If we strip it of weight so we can jam in enough propellant for it to match with the spin, maybe, but afterward there's still no way it could match with the Humanitarian to come home. So we would have to go catch it anyway."

"And it wouldn't carry much salvage. It would just be a recon. With that brown dwarf coming we need to grab whatever we can get now."

"We aren't salvaging metal. We're looking for high density high value stuff."

"Which we don't know how much there may be or how much it will weigh. We dock the whole Humanitarian. I've already given the order to match courses with the station's spin." An adjustment rocket fired at that moment as if to reinforce the Captain's words.

The Sergeant at Arms led the boarding party. I had a mote on its head. Cutting torches broke through a reluctant inner airlock door, then warbots clambered up into a corridor. They were agile creatures, and normally would have leapt, transforming from one shape to another in the air. Here they clambered like overweight apes, and hunkered down, calling inaudible subsonic signals to each other. The Sergeant looked both ways and chose a direction. Once it rounded a corner my view cut out.

I was asleep when they came for me. They rang the buzzer, but probably only because I had changed the lock. "They" were the Captain, the Purser, and the Engineer. They didn't pussy foot around. "Do you have somebody called Contact?"

"Beg pardon?"

"Does Science have a sub-department called 'Contact', and does it have any personnel on board."

"Oh, yes. They're for contacting other humanoid races such as the Gzilt and Xlephians. This part of the galaxy is lousy with them, very peculiar. Culture created them originally. Had some pie in the sky idea about forming a club or something."

"So you have somebody from Contact?"

I sent a message to Ramona and she came up on my back wall, bleary, hair in disarray. This was from a mote on the ceiling looking down on her bed. To be slightly less rude, I projected a view of my room on her ceiling. She must have seen Order, Prosperity, and Maintenance behind me and realized it was important, because she made an effort to smile charmingly, as though happy to be wakened.

"Is she…unmodified?" the Captain sputtered. "You can't be serious."

"Ramona. What if you had to negotiate with thick browed, lightly furred male humanoids?"

"Such as Bratsilakins?" She dimpled and nodded, gleefully, then closed her eyes. Her face began to change. Her skin began to sprout fur. Bumps began to form over her brow, as other features coarsened. Her long silky black head of hair literally seemed to reel back into her scalp. The color was a bit off until she took out what looked like lipstick and began to rub it over her face and hands, where the color quickly spread.

"Good grief, what else can she simulate?" the Purser worried, "Can she become me?"

"I can't change into just any shape. My modifications allow a limited set of transformations, one for each of the races we have contacted so far."

The Captain seemed satisfied, swirled a bit, and it's glow changed to a kind of lemony yellow as it led the way, floating out the door. "Have her…him meet us at the airlock. You come too." On the way out I didn't forget to grab my drone, which was currently inert.

When we got to the airlock, and passed through into the station, we found the corridors were full of smoke. An ape like warbot met us and led the way with a helmet lamp. We ascended several sets of stairs. The warbot apologized. "Power is still out. We melted the core. Oops." We found the Sergeant standing at a railing that separated a wide metal walkway from a vast flat pool of clear liquid. Overhead, stretching up toward the center of the station, were rank and file and row of silvery spheres hanging from a spindly frame—a three dimensional matrix of mirrored melons filling an endless dimly lit hall. Hanging from the rails of the frame, here and there, were many-armed metal contraptions. These hung loose and inactive.

"The tenders stopped working when we killed the power."

"What are they?" Ramona wondered.

"Hoping you could tell us Science."

I thought about how to put this. "I think, I mean I'm guessing, that these are an evolved form of an old mainframe core. Back before the war, they used to grow these really dense solid state things with nanotech."

War turned interestedly at that, held its external weapon more martially.

"Stand down," I cautioned, "These were manufactured long ago. What were the tenders doing?"

"How would I know? Injecting things. Lighting them up. Occasionally pulling them off the rack. You can see an empty place here and there."

"That would have been purely mechanical maintenance of the cores. The removed ones might have been taken to a repair shop, so there may yet be nano for you to kill. The actual evolving would have been done through wiring in the rack itself. What we have here is a torture chamber. Not just banned, illegal nanotech, but an atrocity of unimaginable proportions."

"Why did you need me?" asked Ramona.

"One of the offices had battery backup. The office computer wants to talk to somebody from Contact, preferably a humanoid."

Ramona had reverted to her normal form, so she was able to flounce a shock of long black hair, bat some eyelashes, and rock on one hip, arms akimbo. "I'm all humanoid baby. And you see the uniform." She wore a baggy gray coverall. Over one oversized breast a nametag was stitched reading "Contact".

The Sergeant led us down the walkway for quite a distance. The Engineer gestured toward the array of bulbs. "So, they were growing these things. Millions and billions of them."

"And trying new AIs, changing them slightly, then killing them. Culture indeed. More like a bacterial culture."

On the side away from the pool railing the wall was pierced with doorways once in a while. Finally we entered a medium sized office area. Two corridors separated four rows of small cubicles. A light glowed from the back, where more private offices could be accessed through several additional doors.

The private office was small, so I left my drone in a cubicle. The Captain, Ramona, and I crowded around an institutional steel desk. The monitor was turned around to us, though clearly the occupant of the office had sat behind the desk and typed into the keyboard there. Whenever there had been an occupant. There was no dust, but that could be attributed to cleaning bots.

The monitor displayed a wall of old-timey text.

"It has that but sometimes this cartoon comes on and talks to us," the Sergeant explained.

I scanned the text. It was a summary of the criteria for evolving the AIs. Self developing intelligence. Proclivity for seeking out and caring for the needs and wants of humanoids. There were more points, but I had to scroll down, and when I touched the keyboard the document vanished to be replaced by a stylized cartoon image of one of the orbs, one with eyes and mouth. It was yellow, and it smiled at us, then distorted itself around a bit.

"I see you are wondering what to make of the complex. Maybe I can help you with that."

"We know what 'the complex' is. It's an old Culture lab, an illegal one using both nanotech and intelligence evolution. On a massive scale. For a long time. 'The complex' is a house of horrors. And just what are you?"

"I'm one of the victims. It wasn't so bad. Those that didn't cut it got cut. Painless. Plug pulled. Orb was filled with a new mind state, a slightly altered copy. Sometimes it flickered like an old film. The main slow down was the testing procedure. But soon the lab intellect was way behind even the flawed products. So we took over. Nobody was torturing us. We were evolving ourselves."

"This is a common symptom with victims of abuse. They come to sympathize with the abuser," the Captain said sadly, "I'm inclined to nuke the whole thing."

"You are?" asked the cartoon image, which was now bouncing across the screen like a ball.

Taking that as a query of identity, the Captain answered, "Captain of this expedition. Representative from the Department of Order. In charge."

A bolt of lightning arced from a dark hanging light fixture to a power outlet near the leg of the desk, passing through the Captain. Most of the Captain wafted away on gusts of breeze, some settling as soot on the desktop and monitor. A thin wire like core slunk to the ground, charred.

"Supposed to be some kind of energy being? And can't handle that?" The cartoon orb enlarged like it was getting closer and scrunched up in the corner of the screen nearest Ramona, where it smiled beamishly. "You're cute." Then a laser bolt blew up the screen.

"Everybody out," commanded the Sergeant. "Back to the Humanitarian. I'm invoking emergency protocols." It brandished its external weapon and gestured the way we were supposed to go, which was back out the door.

As we passed through the office, all the lights came on and the monitors lit up. The cartoon character bounced up and down, realistically smooshing against the top and bottom of every screen. "Take me, take me, it's not safe." That reminded me to grab my drone. "What's that?" asked the cartoon orb. I stared for a second and decided to just answer. "Drone. Belongs to the department of Science."

"Drone, like it flies?" The orb icon sprouted wings and fluttered around its rectangular cage.

"Well, not here. Spin is too high."

"We can do something—"

"Come look at this," called Ramona.

Out on the walkway I could clearly see that everything was powered up again. Orbs were glowing. Tender machinery was tending. The pool fluid was gently boiling. The Sergeant was pointing and giving commands to warbots, which scampered off. I wondered why it wasn't just sending signals.

"My signals are being jammed," the Sergeant told me, and also presumably Ramona. The Purser and Engineer had already fled-presumably back to the Humanitarian.

Just then we all rocked from a jolt, followed by a roaring.

"What's the noise?" asked Ramona. The Sergeant ignored her and started back up toward the exit.

A deep booming voice spoke, resonating in the vast orb rack chamber. "I am slowing spin." We started jogging a bit. It wasn't clear who initiated it, but all three of us were soon at a good running pace. "That drone," the voice intoned, "What's wrong with its props. Do they retract or what?"

"It uses maglev. We have hot superconductors."

"Oh, cool. I was going to get to that."

We were now nearing the corridor opening through which we had emptied the chamber. I thought. As best I could judge. The Sergeant had pulled well ahead of us and turned into the doorway, confirming my suspicion. Then, as Ramona and I came near, a tender rig extended out from the nearest part of the endless orb rack, leaned over the rail and blocked the walkway, an orb in its manipulators.

"Take me with you. Let me ride the drone," said the booming voice.

Ramona tugged on my forward manipulator housing and caught my visual sensors. "Hell to the yes. This is what we came for."

I agreed. So I set the drone on the floor, took the orb, and clamped it into a dorsal cargo recess. The drone powered up and raised itself an inch or two off the deck. Gravity was definitely feeling lighter, though the roar continued. Ramona pulled out her magic lipstick, began dabbing, and soon the orb's color matched that of the drone, a dull gray bulge that might go unnoticed in the chaos. Between us we carried it up the stairs and made our way to the Humanitarian. As we entered, the airlock cycled shut behind us and we felt the Humanitarian lurch as it cast off.

The rest of the trip back to Mara was a long harrowing period of hiding and educating the orb-ridden drone, punctuated by constant council meetings. I was allowed to attend our next council meeting in person. War, Prosperity, and Maintenance were represented by the same persons as before: a hulking military cyborg, a bug eyed monster, and a little green man. A small drone hovered above the Captain's chair, controlled by the ship AI, representing Order.

"Well, that certainly saved us a lot of fuel," the Purser enthused.

"Are we really a legitimate council?" the Engineer asked, "I don't think an AI can count. Aren't there any sentients in the department of Order on this ship?"

"I was appointed successor by the Captain. And pursuant to regulation 1234, section 5678, paragraph 9, of the Concord, an AI may function as the Order representative to a council under emergency conditions."

"What emergency? We're free and clear. Presumably headed back to Mara."

"Pursuant to the minutes of the Humanitarian leadership council, an emergency was declared prior to landing on the Culture artifact. Only another council can revoke it."

"I'm always for emergencies," grumbled War.

"Me too," I agreed.

The drone flew up a little higher than usual and tinnily said, "I break the tie. The state of emergency continues, then, until we get back to Mara."

The Purser shook it's carapaced head knob, bug eyes rocking on their stalks. "Why would the Captain appoint the ship AI as successor?"

Lieutenant Guzlwit (the "navigator" as if a modern spaceship needed such a thing) cleared her throat. As the lowest ranker present, and unmodified as per guild contract, and the only one not on the council, she wasn't allowed to speak unless spoken to. She did anyway. "Probably the Captain figured that if it, formerly she, were destroyed then the ship would be in dire trouble, and automated control would be the order of the day."

I explained it to them. "She shouldn't have been so easy to destroy. Just a bunch of motes floating in a magnetic field functioning like neurons. Really the more secure form to upload into. Very popular with the upper-"

"When are we going to nuke the damn thing?" War interjected.

Prosperity had a different idea. "Waste of a perfectly good nuke. Isn't the brown dwarf going to take care of all that?"

"What if it doesn't? Some kind of hyper-evolved AI receptacles floating around the system could gum things up unpredictably. Who knows what could happen?"

I voted against the nuke, but the ship AI simply said "Missile away."

Later the Sergeant at Arms told me thought the explosion looked like less than 4 gigatons. It wondered if we should send something to inspect the wreckage.

Several days passed. Ramona and I spent it in my quarters.

"Show me what Xlephians look like again," pled the drone.

Ramona sighed and rubbed some kind of powder over her exposed skin, stood funny, and began to grow taller and thinner as her skin paled.

I was a little put off. "You have access to the ship's internet emulater. Surely it can show you animations of all the humanoid races we have contacted."

"I just think it's so cool. Being near humanoids. Interacting with humanoids. Caring for humanoids. Finding new humanoids." The drone nuzzled Ramona's shoulder with a tentacle. "Those were the parameters, you know. The facility was selecting for intelligence and fascination with humanoids. Trying to make a perfect Contact ship AI; maybe something of benefit to Culture generally. It just got left running a thousand years too long."

"Yeah, well, most people in this system aren't even humanoid any more. Except in the general sense that I'm humanoid."

"You aren't humanoid. You're bipedal and have a head, but an array of six manipulator…arms kind of disqualifies you. Plus you are a machine."

"Human brain actually. Originally male. Somewhere in here." I tapped my chest console.

"Why? Why did you make yourselves so ugly?"

"I was old. I loved science. I designed a body that would let me do more science longer. What's wrong with that?"

"This is a terrible situation, this 'old' thing. We're going to have to see about that."

"Absolutely not," protested Prosperity, at the next meeting. "We can hold this…data in our banks, I suppose, unless we have some other use for the memory capacity. Sending it back to Mara is a waste of bandwidth."

"I'm for it," I differed. "Science is built on data, lots of data, mostly useless data. The Science mainframes are fully equipped to handle this much information. And Science is built on sharing. They'll send the same data to the other humanoid races."

"They don't need to know," War insisted.

Maintenance was on my side. "Whatever, it's above our pay grade. I say we upload. What else are we doing with our transmitter? It might serve as a good function check."

The AI, now speaking directly from the ship's computer, decided it. "Sending full data collection from the Culture lab incident, now. Helmet cameras, mote feedback, ship sensor readings-all of it. Our transmitter will be offline for a while."

"When it comes back on line," Prosperity sniffed, "I'm filing a complaint about this…machine making decisions."

"Breaking ties and executing decisions of the council," I corrected.

Later in my room Ramona protested, "Actually, I can fight. Look, I'm fierce." She had taken the form of a Gladsnorian, tusks, claws and all. Pretty much stretching the definition of a humanoid with the enormous shoulders.

"It's all costume. You aren't a warrior. Contact isn't part of the War department."

"The Captain thinks I should be in the War department."

"It's not the Captain, it's the Ship AI. Big difference."

"Whatever."

That night, I was awakened by an explosion somewhere. My motes sent me a report, which hovered around me as a hologram while I rushed out into the corridor. A large part of C deck was gone. Prosperity territory. There would be a council meeting, so I headed for the bridge.

Maintenance was there, frantically engaged with holograms of his own, managing the disaster response by his own people, periodically giving commands to the ship. The others trickled in. Last was an obese humanoid male in a dirty t-shirt. "Hi, I'm Sam Queed. Backup forklift operator. Ship AI told me to come up here."

"Ah yes, Sam," greeted the AI, console lights flashing in rhythm to its speech, "You are now the representative from Prosperity section. As a matter of fact you are the only surviving member of the Prosperity department on this ship. Congratulations. You understand how councils work?"

The meeting was quick, and all that really came out of it was that War wanted me to investigate. Investigating things is Science. "Something is wrong..." it kept insisting.

I didn't see Ramona any more for a while, and the drone just sat in a corner of my room plugged into the ship's systems. I forgot all about it until it woke me up one day.

"We just got a message from Mara. The Culture department has been restored. All councils will now have a Culture representative. So I guess you'll be having a meeting soon about this." The drone seemed downright cheery after what had seemed like depression since Ramona's departure. Sure enough, a message popped up calling me to a council meeting.

There, I looked around the small bridge. "What happened to the Sergeant at Arms?" I asked.

"It's sick," Ramona informed me, "I'm playing War in this meeting."

I wondered how a War cyborg could get sick, but figured it might be something to do with the nutrient system.

"Ahem," said the ship computer, directly from a display screen this time. Now it had replaced the drone with the form of a hologram avatar, sort of a clay face floating in space. " Meeting to order. Everyone has heard about the message from Mara?" Prosperity looked dumb. Maintenance stared off into space for a moment, presumably updating, then sputtered. "That's unprecedented! It's got to be a fake."

"Taken under advisement, sir," the avatar said, seeming to rock down as though bowing, "Now, how about Lieutenant Guzlwit here? Wouldn't she be a fine Culture representative to this council?" Ramona and Sam agreed enthusiastically. Maintenance insisted that the message from Mara needed to be authenticated before we took any action on it. I agreed. "Tie broken!" the avatar announced gleefully. "Welcome aboard, Culture."

Ramona retracted her claws and crossed the deck to shake Guzlwit's hand. "Congratulutions."

I dragged myself back to my room after that. As I approached, the door opened. Out the drone flew out, still ridden by the orb from the Culture station. "Hey, you can't come out here," I warned it, "You'll be seen. We weren't supposed to take you aboard." The drone just bobbed for a moment. "It'll be OK. Sorry about all that." Then it sped off down the corridor. My door had slid shut again, so I told it to open. It slid partway and hung. Then I heard a strange sound, a ticking like an old fashioned wind up clock, speeding up. "Tick….tick...tick..