Light Chaser (2021) by Peter F. Hamilton; Gareth L. Powell

Author:Peter F. Hamilton; Gareth L. Powell [Powell, Peter F. Hamilton; Gareth L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

VII

I AM NOT AN enforcer; I don’t oppress people. How dare he tell her that!

Amahle ripped the collar off and stomped out of the lounge. Poor, bewildered Josalyn’s confusion echoed round her mind. It had to belong to Josalyn, because Amahle’s thoughts were quite clear calm and rational, as always. She made a fist and hit the corridor wall.

“Ow!”

“Are you all right?” the AI enquired solicitously.

She glanced round at the nearest camera, suddenly, shockingly aware how she had no privacy at all. Just inside my head—and even that’s not certain. Carloman is right, this is a prison, the greatest ever designed, because I helped build it around myself. “Yes. Fine.” But now I have a kill code, I can break free. If I want to. And I do. Yes, I do . . . I will.

Amahle took another week to nerve herself up to it, but finally, she knew she couldn’t put off the confrontation any longer. She had to gain control of the Mnemosyne. Full control, the kind she’d always thought she had anyway. She had to kill the AI.

What if the kill code doesn’t work? What if it’s a lie? In which case, what did that make Carloman?

No, Occam’s razor is always right. So, what does that say about the life I’m living?

To say she had mixed feelings would have been a gross understatement. She was vandalising the only home she’d known for thousands of years. And yet, there was more at stake than her unchanging existence. Carloman had opened her eyes. The AIs had been subverted and turned against their creators. For millennia, the AIs had held humanity back, perverting the timeline to keep her species in its place, trapped like flies in amber for the benefit of The Exalted. So, now they had to go. She had to strike the first retaliatory blow in a war nobody else knew they’d been losing all this time. And that meant she had to kill her guardian angel.

Although its awareness and various subroutines were distributed throughout the Mnemosyne, the computer’s physical core lay housed in a substrate in the ship’s engineering section. To get to it, she had to don a pressure suit and descend far past the inhabitable sections of the ship, riding a service lift down the ship’s spine to the industrial tangle at its stern. Once she had the suit on, she buckled on the sword and scabbard she’d worn on Winterspite. Then she summoned the lift and stepped inside. Pressed for the engineering deck.

“Where are you going?” the AI asked over the comms channel.

Amahle’s stomach felt fluttery. Did the AI control the lifts, or were they an automatic system? Could it trap her in there if it guessed her intent?

“I just want to take a look at the engines,” she said.

“For what purpose?”

“Curiosity.”

“They have just been refurbished. The next inspection isn’t due until we return to Glisten.”

Was it her imagination, or was the AI starting to sound suspicious? It would be monitoring her vital signs via the suit.

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