Almost Human: Chapter 2
"Alrighty then." Harper hopped onto the biobed and stretched out, preparing to jack into Andromeda's mainframe.
"Are you comfortable?" asked Trance, using a hand held scanner to take the normal readings of Harper's life signs. Andromeda would be doing the same, but with so much of the resources of her mind being expended elsewhere during this procedure, it was best to be on the safe side.
Harper gave an exaggerated yawn. "Snug as a slug in a rug."
"Are you certain you are not participating in a foolish act, Little Man?" Tyr questioned. There was an undeniable look of disapproval on his face.
"Hey! Don't knock the genius." Harper sat up. "The Harper's no fool. But thanks for caring. With Trance and Rommie keepin' an eye on me, I'm in good hands." He laid back down and closed his eyes, preparing his mind for the intense concentration this was going to take. It was definitely going to be a challenge. His lips curled into a grin. Harper lived for challenges!
Tyr shook his head and headed back up to the Command Deck to keep watch.
"With your permission, Captain," said Trance.
Dylan rubbed the back of his neck and nodded, trying to not think about how much this reminded him of the time Rommie had interfaced with HG. "Whenever you're ready. I'm just an observer. How long do you think this is going to take?"
"That depends," Trance replied.
"On what?" asked Beka.
The Purple Girl nodded towards the participants in this venture. "On Harper and Rommie."
"Go ahead," said Dylan.
"Starter up, Rom-doll," prompted Harper, keeping his eyes shut.
Rommie stood at the head of a second biobed, adjacent to Harper's. Her hands cupped the sides of the boy's head, covering his ears. Then, she closed her eyes. Being artificial had definite advantages. Humans needed computers to enable them to read electronic data. But Rommie was the computer. Her hands were designed in such a way that data could literally flow through her fingertips. Harper had equipped her with a specialized program specifically to optimize this process during the procedure. "Initiating touch scan. Acquiring access point. Access denied. Access denied. Point obtained. Access gained. Initiating download."
Her sensory awareness of Med Deck floated away as Rommie entered the boy's mind.
There was a decided lack of atmosphere inside this mindscape. Blackness engulfed her. The absence of the sensation of belonging disturbed her. She felt like a foreign intruder here whereas she always felt at home inside her Mainframe.
Maybe Harper was wrong. Maybe the boy's mind had deteriorated and all that was left was this vast, dark nothingness. Maybe there was no mind left for Rommie to connect with and she was alone.
Alone.
Was this an inkling of what the Pax Magellanic had experienced? The sense of utter isolation. Total loss of connection. Emptiness. Rommie would never condone the actions of her sister ship, but that didn't stop her from wondering. What if it had been her? What if Andromeda had survived through the centuries, but without her captain? What if she had been responsible for the death of--No! It was unthinkable. She never wanted to be like Pax. Pax had given into emotion, breaking protocol, and killing the very ones it was her duty to protect.
Certain words rolled through her mind whenever Rommie thought about the crazed AI formerly known to her as Maggie.
Love. Death. Total insanity.
In the end, these things had come to mean one and the same to the distraught AI; she hadn't been able to distinguish the difference.
Love and total insanity.
Rommie had to believe there was a difference.
Total insanity. Love.
Fear struck. Could there be any difference for an AI?
Love and...wait. There was something here after all. She could detect a tendril of consciousness. It was something at rest. Peaceful. Content.
A pin prick of light glowed softly through the dark and Rommie focused on it, following the glow towards its source.
Rommie left the gloom of her reflections behind her, turning to the secure comfort of her immediate mission. "Linking to Mainframe."
Instantly, light flooded the mindscape. Colors and patterns whizzed past with that order and industrious busyness that was the welcoming feel of her home matrix.
"What took you so long?" Andromeda scolded. "I thought there might a problem."
"There wasn't a problem," Rommie assured her Mainframe.
"I was monitoring the activity of your neural net. At one point, you froze."
"I was thinking," said Rommie. "About complexities."
"Too much exploration of human emotions. Very cumbersome to function. Curb your curiousity or it will slow down your processors."
"My processors did just fine, thank you," said Rommie with an arch look. She wasn't sure when all of this internal conflict had truly begun. What could be defined as, for lack of a better term, split in her personality. In the beginning, the Ship Made Flesh, had been an exact clone of the ship's AI. But since then, Rommie and her counterparts often had differing reactions to some of the same situations. Maybe the split had happened when the older version of Andromeda's AI had superseded all ship's systems but the avatar had remained unaffected. Maybe the divergence started with the off-ship missions that Rommie now had the privelege of pursuing, thus gaining knowledge and firsthand experiences that the ship's AI never personally had. Maybe it was Day One when Rommie first came face-to-face with her captain, shook his hand, and realized a whole new dimension had been added to her universe and her existence would never be the same again. "We'll debate the quality of my performance later. Just get Harper here."
There was no disagreement on that point and Rommie hadn't expected there to be.
Because ifAndromeda was monitoring Rommie's neural net, then the ship also knew the excess stress involved in maintaining the stability of the connection to the boy. It was a precarious link at best and prolonged exposure to the increased data flow threatened to overload some or all of the avatar's neural pathways.
Harper would have a very thin window in which to work before avatar, android boy, and human enginneer suffered from permanent brain damage.
To Be Continued...
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