I ducked away, and was out the exit of the building before he could catch up. But . . . what now? Suddenly, a gaping hole appeared in our little subterfuge. What if the guards at the gate told the admiral that I’d never left last night?
Surely they didn’t report to the admiral every day about every person who went in and out of the base. Right? But if I left now, then came right back in, they’d definitely notice something was odd.
So, instead of going to the gate, I aimlessly walked the pathways of the base, between buildings. It was dark out, the skylights dim and the pathways mostly empty. In fact, I passed more statues than I did people: busts of the First Citizens—looking toward the sky—lined this part of the walkway.
A too-cold gust of wind blew across me, shaking the branches of a nearby tree. In the dim light, the statues were haunting figures, their stone eyes lost in shadow. The air smelled of smoke from the nearby launchpads, a pungent scent. A fighter must have returned to base on fire recently.
I sighed and sat down on a bench along the walkway, dropping my pack next to me. I felt . . . melancholy, perhaps a little wistful. The call light on the radio was still blinking. Maybe talking to M-Bot would kick me out of my funk.
I switched it into receiving mode. “Hey, M-Bot.”
“I’m outraged!” M-Bot said. “This is an insult beyond insults! I cannot express with words my indignation, but my built-in thesaurus says that I am insulted, affronted, maltreated, desecrated, injured, ravaged, persecuted, and/or possibly molested.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to turn you off.”
“Turn me off?”
“I’ve had the radio off all night. Isn’t that what you’re angry about?”
“Oh, that’s just normal human forgetfulness. But don’t you remember? I wrote a subroutine to express that I’m mad at you?”
I frowned, trying to remember what the ship was talking about.
“You said I was a Krell?” he said. “I got mad? It was kind of a big deal?”
“Right. Sorry.”
“Apology accepted!” M-Bot answered. He sounded pleased with himself. “I projected a nice sense of outrage, don’t you think?”
“It was splendid.”
“I thought so.”
I sat for a time, silent. Something about last night. It left me feeling reflective, quiet.
She really isn’t ever going to let me fly. I thought, smelling the smoke from the launchpad fire. I can graduate, but it will be meaningless.
“You’re right though,” M-Bot noted. “I might be a Krell.”
“WHAT?” I said, practically smacking myself with the radio as I raised it to my lips.
“I mean, my data banks have mostly been lost,” M-Bot said. “There’s no saying what was in there.”
“Then why did you get so angry at me for suggesting you might be a Krell!”
“It seemed the correct thing to do. I’m supposed to simulate having a personality. What person would let themselves be slandered like that? Even if it was a completely logical assumption, and you are making a perfectly valid threat assessment by wondering about it.”
“I really don’t know what to make of you, M-Bot.”
“I don’t either. Sometimes, my subroutines engage with responses before my main personality simulator has time to rein them in. It’s very confusing. In a perfectly logical, machine way, not at all irrational like human emotions.”
“Sure.”
“You are using sarcasm. Be careful, or I’ll engage my outrage routine again. But if it helps, I don’t think the Krell are AIs, regardless of what your DDF thinkers have determined.”
“Really? Why do you think that?”
“I’ve analyzed their flight patterns. And yours, by the way. I might have some pointers to help you improve. It seems . . . I have entire subroutines dedicated to that kind of analysis.
“Anyway, I don’t think all of the Krell are AIs, though some might be. My analysis finds that most of their patterns are individual, not complying with easily determined logical routines. At the same time they are reckless, which is curious. I suspect they are drones of some sort, though I will say that Cobb is right: this planet exerts some interference on communications. I appear to have boosting technology that helps me pierce the interference.”
“Well, you are a stealth ship. Advanced communications technology probably helped with your missions.”
“Yes. My holographic projectors, active camouflage, and sonar avoidance are probably there for the same reason.”
“I didn’t even know you could do most of those things. Camouflage? Holograms?”
“My settings say I had these systems engaged on standby mode, creating an illusion of rubble over my ship and preventing scans from detecting my cavern, until recently when my backup power ran out. I’d give you the exact time to the nanosecond, but humans generally hate that kind of precision, as it makes me seem calculating and alien.”
“Well, that probably explains why nobody found you all those years.” I tapped the radio, thoughtful.
“Regardless,” M-Bot said, “I hope I’m not a Krell. That would be super embarrassing.”
“You’re no Krell,” I said—and realized I meant it. I’d worried earlier, but now . . . I just couldn’t explain why, but I knew he wasn’t.
“Maybe,” he said. “I’ll admit I’m . . . worried that I might be something evil like that, and not know it.”
“If you were a Krell, why would you have human living space and plugs that work with ours?”
“I could have been built to infiltrate human society by imitating one of your ships,” he said. “Or actually, what if the Krell are all rogue AIs originally created by humans? That would explain why I had your writing on me. Or maybe I—”
“You’re not a Krell,” I said. “I can feel it.”
“That’s probably some irrational human confirmation bias speaking,” he noted. “But my subroutine that can simulate appreciation . . . is appreciative.”
I nodded.
“That’s kind of what it does,” he added. “Appreciate things.”
“I would never have figured.”
“It can appreciate something at a million times per second. So you could say your comment is likely the single most appreciated thing you’ve ever done.”
“I’d appreciate you shutting up about how great you are once in a while,” I said, but I smiled and stuck the radio onto my backpack.
“I’m not appreciating that comment,” he noted softly. “Just so you know.”
I flipped the radio off, then stood up and stretched. A few First Citizen busts seemed to glare at me from nearby. Including a younger Cobb. How strange to look at an image of him now that I knew him so well. He shouldn’t look young. Hadn’t he been born a crusty fifty-year-old man?
I shouldered my pack and wandered back toward the flight school building.
An MP stood right outside the main entrance.
I stopped in place. Then, worried, I approached.
“Cadet Nightshade?” the MP asked. “Callsign: Spin.”
My heart sank.