Providence - Max Barry Page 0,48
waving his arms, corralling crabs. Anders saw him and stopped and lowered his arms and the crabs began to disperse. Gilly kept walking because he didn’t want to know what that was.
The ship opened fire. There was no klaxon. But they could feel the coil and release of power. They scrambled for station, thinking it was another emergency, another systems failure; now even the klaxon didn’t work. Gilly was near Weapons at the time and Anders came storming up the corridor with his eyes full of crazy energy and shoved him aside. Gilly reached station and strapped in and Jackson’s voice came through saying there was no enemy. The ship was launching drones and destroying them. It was practicing.
“Goddamn it,” said Anders.
“Just a drill,” Gilly said. “It’s testing countermeasures to the bomb, like I said.”
“Piece of crap.”
“Cool it,” Jackson said. There was silence. The ship ran through the same process over and over, launch and destroy, using different weapons.
“I want to do something,” Anders said.
Of course, they were hoping the ship would develop a hard counter to the hive bomb so that everything could go back to how it had been, when they had destroyed salamanders with ease and minimal human input. But it was hard to deny that when things had gone wrong, it had been the most exciting part of the last two years. It was the kind of thing Gilly had had in mind when he got interested in making crew. That must go double for the soldiers, he thought, and double again for a guy like Anders. He could understand someone nursing a small wish for the ship to need them again.
“I think we’re done here,” Jackson said, after the thirtieth drone. “Nothing’s happening.”
* * *
—
He tried to avoid the issue of seizing manual control of the ship, but Jackson pinged him regularly for updates and there were only so many times he could stall. In the mess, where you weren’t supposed to talk shop, or at least not too much of it, she sipped at a steel cup and asked whether he intended to have a report for her before the war was over, or afterward. He glanced at Beanfield, since the moratorium on shop talk was her policy, but she gave him nothing.
“It’s a complicated area,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for an assessment on how complicated it is,” Jackson said. “I asked you to tell me what we can do.”
“Look, the answer is nothing. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but it’s the truth.”
There was a momentary silence. “Gilly,” said Beanfield, “there are times when you make it incredibly clear you didn’t come through the military.”
“What about a kill switch?” Jackson said.
He looked at her, surprised. “What?”
“Isn’t there a mechanism to disable the AI in an emergency?”
He hesitated. The answer was yes. Furthermore, Jackson definitely knew that. It abruptly occurred to him that this was the endgame she’d had in mind for some time. She had never liked the idea of computers controlling everything and had seen her chance to change it. “There’s something like that.”
“Now we’re talking,” said Anders.
“But,” he said, adjusting his position on what felt like an abruptly hard seat, “it should never, ever be used.”
“Then why does it exist?” Jackson said.
“Everything would stop working. And I mean everything.” Jackson didn’t respond. “We’re in VZ,” he added. “There’s no backup if something goes wrong.”
“I appreciate your expertise with the ship,” Jackson said. “And I understand you have a career interest in whether it succeeds. But here’s what I see. We’re a long way from home, the last time we engaged we got our butts handed to us, and the AI has started hiding rooms.”
“One room.”
Jackson smacked the table with her palm. The plates and cups jumped. There was a short silence.
“If we activate the kill switch,” Jackson said, “we wouldn’t have to rely on the AI to use systems like Weapons. They’d be available for manual operation. Correct?”
“Yes, but—”
“I know these systems weren’t designed