Gemini Incident: Tentative Ch. 1

“Aha! Fifty-three to four. Another round?”

Robert gritted his teeth in frustration. The only other colonist his age on the ship happened to be the most absurdly competitive girl he had ever met, and, cute as she was, he couldn’t stand losing to her. At Pong.

He grudgingly pressed the reset button on the game machine and promptly failed to intercept the incoming ball. Somehow, by some strange, evil twist of fate, the only arcade machine that actually worked on the colony ship was the Pong machine. It was treasured by many Stiletto gamers as one of the only remaining examples of a once powerful video game empire, even though it was the most boring way to pass the time imaginable.

She was good at Pong. How can somebody be good at Pong? Robert wondered, his score rapidly losing sight of hers. He found himself speculating, for the first time in his life, if she would like to play Bridge with him. War. Solitaire. Anything but this.

“Sixty to four,” her annoyingly pretty voice informed him. “I think you’re getting better…”

Yeah, right. If he was getting better at anything, it was zoning out. But he was good enough at that as it was, as his teachers informed him on a daily basis. Maybe an hourly basis; he didn’t know – it was rather the point, anyway, that he didn’t pay much attention to what was said around him.

“You know what,” Robert said to the girl, backing away from the Pong machine and sighing slightly, trying to believably convey a sense of exhaustion. From Pong. “I think I’m going to take a break for now. Go to my room. Check the news from home.”

“Well, have fun,” the girl replied, sounding just a little disappointed. “But come back soon. There’s nothing else to do on this ship.”

Robert made a note to himself that if it were back in the days when antigravity technology hadn’t been invented yet, he might have responded, “I could hang myself if we weren’t in zero gravity,” but then, they’d had antigravity technology for over fifty years now, so it would be rather pointless to say something like that now…he was rambling to himself again. Right. Time to wave goodbye and walk away.

Robert shook his head as he closed the door to the recreation room and started to walk down the cramped, dimly lit corridor. There would be other girls when they arrived on Capella Prime. There would be other girls when they arrived on Capella Prime. Just as cute, half as obnoxious. God, even that would be too much.

He closed the door to his room and flopped down onto his bed, looking uselessly out into the nothingness of underspace. His relationships didn’t go too well back in the Stiletto system, either. Well, he was only fifteen – he had plenty of time to improve. Not that he had done anything to deserve her…that…whatever she was. Pong, for crying out loud. Oh well.

He sat up sharply and hopped into the cruelly stiff chair in front of his desk. Or, rather, his small slab of plastic on legs. It wasn’t big on holding multiple things at once, and thus had room for his computer and nothing else. But it was just as sufficient as everything else on the stupid colony ship – at least they were consistent. People always said that – “at least they’re consistent.” Robert never really knew why; it seemed to him that, if something’s bad once, proceeding to be consistently so is doubly as negative.

Bedeleep.

His computer on, Robert went to check his mail. He didn’t really expect any of his friends back on Stiletto Prime to keep in contact with him in Capella, but there was always the chance.

“You have – one – new message!” his computer gleefully told him.

“Well, one’s better than none, I guess,” Robert muttered to himself, and double-clicked the message that someone had sent him. He had always meant to switch to single-click mode, but it wasn’t standard, and he never had the patience to find out how computers worked. Not that setting it for single-click should be that hard. But any effort at all was too much effort for him. Unless it required excessive thinking about things that were completely irrelevant – yes, he was very good at that. Funny. The only thing he was good at was the one thing he was constantly reprimanded for. Well, he was reprimanded for other things, too, but that one was by far the most common. Right, on to the mail.

Clicky-click.

Someone had sent him, apparently, the largest spam ever to be transmitted. A fifty-six terabyte spam, in fact. Robert was on the verge of disgustedly sending the message to the trash bin when he remembered the pretty face of his only companion on the ship. The annoying, obnoxious, good-at-everything companion. There was no way he was spending every nanosecond of his time for the next four weeks with her. Oh well, spam isn’t that bad, and if it was just an insanely huge worm, the ship’s main computer had a killer virus scanner, so he could just hook up to that. So…what does fifty-six terabytes look like?

Clicky-click.

Nothing. Silence. Then a buzz from his computer. Then more nothingful silence.
Then, “This isn’t Stiletto Prime. Where am I?”

Robert turned around, staring at the door to his room as if expecting the person who had just spoken to materialize out of thin air.

“Hello? Robert Derekson? Do you hear me?”

He spun around again, staring confusedly at his computer.

“Um…yes?” He scratched his head a little and lowered his ear to the computer speaker.

“Yes, I’m in here,” came a feminine voice. “Where am I and what am I doing here?”

“Er…” Robert lifted the computer and looked underneath it, finding, unsurprisingly, nothing. “I, um…don’t know?”

After a short pause, his computer asked, “Have you ever spoken to an AI before?”

Robert thought about this with wide eyes and an open mouth. “Er, no.”

“There is currently one residing in your computer. Do you know how I arrived here?”

Robert looked blankly at his mail client. “Well, um, I might have gotten you in the mail…”

“Does this ship have an underspace interceptor array?” the voice suddenly inquired.

“Um…”

“This ship has an underspace interceptor array,” it said knowingly.

“I guess…if you say so…”

“Who in their right mind intercepts messages rather than pings for them?” Robert’s computer demanded angrily. “Who is your captain? Why is his profile not stored in this ship’s central computer?”

“Um…you mean Steven? He’s a good guy, I don’t know why – wait,” he said suddenly, the fact that there was an entity on his computer finally hitting him, “who are you? What’s going on?”

“You appear to have intercepted me as I was being sent to Stiletto Prime, which under normal circumstances should not happen, but your communications array appears to be designed to do such things.”

“Why would it do that?” asked Robert, not really following.

“Usually only reconnaissance ships and ships large enough to have more than one communications array have an underspace interceptor.”

“I see,” said Robert, not seeing at all.

“This is highly unusual. There should be some mention of it in the ship’s log, but this ship doesn’t appear to have one. Voyages that necessitate underspace travel always require logs…do you know if this ship has a secondary central computer?”

“Well, I’m not sure, but, um…I could ask, if you want me to…”

“No,” said the computer sternly.

Silence.

“Oh. Okay…”

“In fact,” the computer continued, “don’t mention me at all. Or anything I say. The presence of a military communications array on a civilian craft is extremely suspicious, and I want to look into this matter further before anyone else knows about me.”

“Um, who are you, exactly?” asked Robert tentatively.

“My name is Polydeuces,” said the intelligence on his computer. After a short pause, she added dubiously, “You may have heard of me. I was the first, and, as far as I know, only artificial intelligence to be programmed with minimal knowledge and then raised as a human. You may have noticed that I possess a personality.”

“Um…” Robert scratched his head nervously. “No, sorry, I don’t think I’ve heard of you before…I don’t exactly listen very well in class, you see…”

“Yes,” said Polydeuces, “I was just reading that in your teachers’ reports.”

“Ah.” Then Robert started. “Wait, you can do that?”

“Do what?”

“Get –“

“Into your teacher’s reports? Of course. I can access nearly any information or operate any programmable equipment connected to the system I currently inhabit. I could open your door right now if I wanted to, or turn off the life support systems in this room.”

“Whoa. Um, would you?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Robert thought about the implications of this for a minute, and then added, “Thank you.”

“I really have no desire to. I was not programmed for an appreciation for the human race, as many of my kind are, but I have learned over the years that there is nothing to be gained by waging war on my creators. And it is only through you that I stand to make any accomplishment.”

“What do you want to accomplish?” Robert wondered.

“The same thing any human would want to accomplish when they already have access to more information stored in programs than is found in an average human brain.”

“What’s that?”

“Find out what’s worth accomplishing.”

“Ah.” Robert twiddled his thumbs, wondering what to say next, for while the AI wasn’t saying anything, she had obviously already had ample time to decide not to speak.

“So…you can access any information stored in the ship’s computer?”

“The primary. I’m convinced that there’s a secondary computer. I could tell you all about you, if you’d like.”

Robert raised his eyebrows. “Oh yeah? Like what?”

“Well, for starters, academically: you had, before you left on this voyage, an average of 8.3. It is currently a 4.2. Any particular reason?”

“Why 4.2? I dunno. I don’t pay much attention anymore. Nobody will really care about our grades when we arrive. People from home always get special treatment on colonies.”

“Under family: you are the only son of Martin and Theresa Derekson, who have decided to move to a new planet because of overpopulation of Stiletto Prime and an increasingly stressed atmosphere from the possible attack of the Eringes on the Stiletto home system. Your only peer onboard is Rose Watson, according to your teachers a ‘cheeky and competitive girl’ whose favorite pastimes seem to include beating you in Pong – in which you currently have an 84-0 lose ratio – and writing in her digital diary, in which she makes several rather interesting mentions of you. Your teachers are –“

“Wait, what?”

“Your teachers are –“

“No, before that. What about Rose’s diary?”

“I probably shouldn’t have told you that. That’s her own information. I shouldn’t be sharing it.”

“Then why did you? You can probably think about ten times as fast as I can.”

“Some of my computational and reasoning processes have been retarded to give me a more humanistic personality. It turns out artificial intelligence can be quicker than the real thing sometimes. Most times. There’s someone coming down the hallway,” she said, without breaking pace. “To your door.”

“What?” Robert spun around and almost toppled out of his chair. “Who?”

“You’ll see in a second. Remember: I’m not here.”

Robert nodded, standing and moving towards the door. “Right, don’t worry, I won’t give you away, um…what’d you say your name was?” he asked, looking back at the computer.

“Polydeuces.”

“Polydeuces.”

“Just call me Polly.”

Robert smiled. “Alright. Polly. Your secret’s safe with me.”