Frozen Orbit by Patrick Chiles

Author:Patrick Chiles [Chiles, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Action & Adventure, Hard Science Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781982124304
Google: z6yyxgEACAAJ
Amazon: 198212430X
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2020-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

Jack pounded away on their treadmill while Traci described her experience with Daisy. She’d gone so far as to pull the circuit breakers from all the monitors on the rec deck, just to make sure they had complete privacy.

“You think she tricked you?” he panted.

Traci noticed that the more she explained, the harder he ran. Interesting. “That’s what I’m struggling with: I can’t tell. So much of it felt like something you would say. Like she’s been reading your mind.”

“Wouldn’t be hard to do. She has access to our shared library. She could digest our whole collection in seconds. Probably has already.”

“Should we do a keyword search in Daisy’s activity logs?”

“Depends on how much this upsets you. I kind of expect her to read my books.”

“You’re okay with that?”

“No reason not to be. If we’re willing to share with each other, why not her?”

“I’m not sure I like calling her . . . her. It’s weird.”

He mopped a rivulet of sweat that had been gathering above his eyes. “I just don’t think about it much. It’s easier.”

“Easier to not think about it?”

“No!” he said. That hadn’t come out right. “Easier to not think about if it’s weird to give our computer a gender. Female voice, female name derived from a deliberate acronym . . . weird would be calling Daisy ‘he.’”

“I suppose so. And ‘it’ just seems wrong.”

“So here we are, back where we started.” He shut down the treadmill. “Don’t beat yourself up. Our whole plan was to be as objective as possible. If anything, I blew it by falling asleep when it wasn’t my turn.”

“If you had been awake, I’d have been convinced it was you.”

“So Daisy was messing with you. She was trying to pass the test.”

For Traci, that idea held its own troubling implications and was the root of her struggle. “Trying” meant the computer wanted her to be fooled when she’d expected it to just react to whatever propositions were put forth. It was engaged, not passive. “Guess I’m not as smart as I like to think,” she sighed, and sank into a nearby couch. “Not that any of us are. Maybe the concept of intelligence is just too abstract for us to test.”

“Then here’s one to bake your noodle: What about alien intelligence?” he asked, wiping his brow. “Would we even recognize it?”

She handed him a squeeze bottle of electrolyte water. “Assuming they don’t show up in giant starships, in which case there’d be no getting around it.”

“Which we know isn’t likely to happen,” he said between drinks. “They’d have to deal with the same physics we do. And I doubt we could comprehend their thinking any more than an ant could comprehend ours.”

“I’m still not convinced there’s anyone else out there.”

“But Noelle did get some interesting data.”

“Not the same thing,” Traci said with an uncharacteristic edge to her voice. “It’s like those Martian meteorite fossils—it’s been a few decades now and the exobiologists are still arguing over them.”

“The early traces look pretty strong,” he said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.