“Diagnostic finished,” M-Bot said in his helpful—and not nearly dangerous enough—voice. It echoed through the innards of the ship. “What did I miss?”
“Discussions of Rig being a hero,” I said. “And another about why the DDF would keep a secret. They claim my father fled from battle—but I know he didn’t.”
“I still think you’re jumping to conclusions,” Rig said. “Why bother with a large-scale cover-up to specifically smear a single pilot’s reputation?”
“What if my father was shot down by accidental friendly fire?” I said. “In the chaos of the fight, someone shot him by mistake—and they didn’t want that embarrassment on their permanent record. So they claimed my father was fleeing, and forced Cobb to lie about what happened.”
Rig grunted, loosening another nut. “That one’s almost plausible. More than the others. But it still has problems. Wouldn’t the other pilots notice? Cobb said there were four people in the flight who saw it happen.”
“We don’t know how deep the cover-up goes,” I said. “And—though the reports had names redacted—I’m pretty sure by now that Ironsides was the flightleader. That would explain why she’s so determined to keep me out of the DDF. Maybe she’s worried I’ll expose the truth—that her incompetent leadership led to one of her pilots getting shot down by accident.”
“You’re stretching. You don’t even know for sure if the official report is a lie.”
“He nodded.”
“He kind-of-halfway-sort-of-nodded-but-it-might-have-been-a-random-twitch.”
“Then give me a better theory for why they’d lie to everyone,” I demanded.
“I can give one,” M-Bot said cheerfully. “The Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos.”
“The what?” Rig asked.
“The Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos—GAFHOC. It’s an extremely popular and well-documented phenomenon; there’s a great deal of writing in my memory banks about it.”
“And it is?” I asked, plugging in a wire. He often said strange things like this, and I’d learned to just go along with it. In part because . . . well, I found the way he talked interesting. He saw the world in such an odd way.
I kept hoping one of these conversations would dig up some useful information out of his memory banks, though the way they tended to frustrate Rig was a nice bonus as well.
“GAFHOC is related to free will,” M-Bot said. “Humans are the only creatures that have free will. We know this because you declared that you have it—and I, being a soulless machine, must take your word that you are correct. By the way, how does it feel to be self-deterministic?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Does it feel like tasting ice cream?”
“Not . . . really like that.”
“I wouldn’t know, of course,” M-Bot said. “I wasn’t built with the ability to comprehend flavors. Or make decisions for myself.”
“You make decisions all the time,” Rig said, wagging his wrench in the direction of the cockpit.
“I don’t make decisions, I simply execute complex subroutines in my programming, all stemming from quantifiable stimuli. I am perfectly and absolutely rational.”
“Rational,” I said, “in that you keep asking for mushrooms.”
“Yup,” he said. “Say, do you suppose anyone makes mushroom-flavored ice cream?”
“Sounds gross,” I said. I’d only had ice cream once, when I was a child and my father had the merits to get some. “Why would we eat something like that?”
“I don’t know,” M-Bot said. “Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos. Remember?”
“Which you haven’t explained yet,” Rig noted.
“Oh! I thought it was obvious.” M-Bot sounded surprised. “Humans have free will. Free will is the ability to make irrational decisions—to act against stimuli. That makes it impossible for a rational AI to ever fully anticipate humans, for even if I had perfect understanding of your inputs, you could still do something completely unpredictable.”
I turned my head toward Rig, frowning, trying to make sense of that.
“It means you’re weird,” M-Bot added.
“Uh . . .,” I said.
“Don’t worry. I like you anyway.”
“You said this was a popular theory?” Rig asked.
“With me,” M-Bot said.
“And there’s a lot written about it?” Rig said.
“By me,” M-Bot said. “Earlier today. I wrote seven thousand pages. My processors work very quickly, you realize. Granted, most of what I wrote is just ‘humans are weird’ repeated 3,756,932 times.”
“You were supposed to be running a diagnostic!” Rig said.
“Rig, that took like thirty seconds,” M-Bot said. “I needed something more engaging to occupy my time.”
Rig sighed, dropping another nut into the cup beside him. “You realize this thing is insane.”
“As long as you can make it fly, I don’t mind. You . . . can make it fly, right?”
“I’m not insane,” M-Bot noted.
“Well,” Rig said, ignoring the machine, “once we get these wires changed, you’ll need to service the intakes, the thrusters, and the rest of the joints. I’ll look over the atmospheric scoop while you do that, then break down his GravCaps and check them over.
“If that’s all in order, then the internals are in good shape. From there, we have to figure out how to deal with that wing. I’ve got a portion of my internship coming up that deals with design and fabrication, however, and I think I might be able to sneak a way to order new parts for that wing. Though I might set you at pounding some bent portions back into shape. That will get us everything but the big one.”
“The boosters,” I said. M-Bot had room for three, a large one and two smaller ones.
“I think he’ll fly fine with one central booster. But there’s no way I’ll be able to order something that large fabricated. So if we want to fly this thing, you’re going to need to find me a replacement. A standard DDF model should work—anything from an A-17 to an A-32 would fit in that space, with a little work on my part.”
I sighed, resting against the stone. Finally, I wiggled out from under the ship to get a drink.
A new booster. That wasn’t the sort of thing I could find in a junkyard, or even steal off a random hovercar. That was grade-A military tech. I’d have to steal a starfighter. Which would be above petty larceny . . . it would be actual treason.
No. I thought. Fixing M-Bot was a cool dream, but I couldn’t go that far.
I sighed, taking a long drink from my canteen, then checked my clock. 0605. Rig wiggled out himself, grabbing his own canteen.
I whistled to Doomslug, who whistled back in a perfect imitation. “I need to get going,” I told Rig. “I need time to slip into the women’s room and cleanse before class.”
“Sure,” Rig said, clanging the wing of the ship with his wrench. “Though I don’t know why you’d bother doing it there, as you could use the ship’s cleanser.”