West of Nothing

9. Behind their Backs

"We should be getting back," Corny said. "Even if we are only the beta testers."

Mason shoveled up the remainder of his food with as much grace as a backhoe. Shouter popped a final cherry tomato into his mouth and pushed away his tray.

Using a temporary security badge, Doogie led them back down the pea-soup corridor and through the cube labyrinth to the Bridge. Gabby, who seemed in an unusual rush, was the first through the double doors. Instead of going to her own station, she headed for Skunkworks' instead. The glow of the monitors tinted his beard teal-blue, making him look like a kiddie pirate. When he wheeled around to face her, his face wore an uncharacteristic look of glee. "You were right, my girl. It took the bait, hook, line and sinker."

"You two are up to something!" Shouter said.

"We thought we'd take advantage of the break to collect a little extra data," Skunkworks explained.

"You ran a secret experiment while we were gone?" Corny's tone portended trouble.

"Just a teensy one," Skunkworks sounded a bit less strident. "Before you rip me a new asshole, let me show you what we got. Direct your attention to jumbo three." At first, the screen looked little different from the live-feeds. The X-Bot was sitting at the bottom of the bell, its red eye swiveling now and then, but otherwise doing nothing. Suddenly it moved to the side wall and began to climb.

"We've seen this already!" Shouter said. "Why are we watching it again?"

"Look at the timestamp," Skunkworks directed.

Doogie read it off the lower corner. "Isn't that around when we went to lunch? You were still here keeping an eye on it, right?"

"Sort of."

"What do you mean sort of?" Corny glowered at the old engineer. "Were you here or not?"

"I went to a room just down the hall. I had a tablet patched through so I could watch what was going on and trip the resonator if the X-Bot made a move."

"Hold on," Doogie said. "Are you implying the X-Bot waited for us to leave before trying to escape?"

"I'm not implying anything," replied Skunkworks. "I'm just rolling the tape."

I'll say it then, Gabby said from the overhead ticker. I believe the X-Bot possesses a theory of mind. I got the idea when Shouter and I started tracking its gaze. So I asked Skunkworks to run a little test for me.

"What's a theory of mind?" Mason asked.

It means it can recognize intentionality in other agents. Basically, it can tell the difference between a rock rolling downhill and a foot kicking a rock and causing it to roll. It's considered a key marker of true general AI.

"That's not all," Skunkworks said. "You haven't seen the best part yet. Watch what happens next."

When the X-Bot was about halfway to the top, there came a faint buzzing sound that caused the video to go slightly out of focus.

"That's the resonator kicking in, right?" Doogie said. "So why isn't it falling?"

"I sort of wondered that too. Right after I clenched my sphincter shut. For a split second there, I forgot about the emergency plug. I never thought it'd actually get used. So after I came to my senses and tripped the plug, I came back in here to figure out what I'd missed. By then, the X-Bot was sitting in its original spot as if nothing had happened. If it hadn't all been caught on video, I would have sworn I'd imagined the whole goddamn thing."

"So the resonator wasn't working?"

"Oh, the resonator was working all right. And no, the X-Bot isn't able to defy gravity. Notice how it's taking the same route up the wall as all the other times. Since the slope everywhere the same, there's no technical reason why it should show a directional preference. At first I chalked it up to lazy programming, just running the same routines over and over. But then I got to thinking, what if there was a reason to follow in its own footsteps? As it turns out, there was. See those small streaks there?" He switched to an earlier time slice before the blurring effect of the resonator kicked in.

"I don't see anything!" Shouter said.

"I'll boost magnification." He dialed it up five-fold, at which point the tiny white streaks became clearly visible. "I started to put two and two together, and it would seem our little microbot is much cleverer than we gave him credit for. Every time it went to climb the wall, it wiped some of that acid goop onto its feet, forming those tiny blister-ridges you see there. The ridges have a distinctive molecular structure, so they don't vibrate along with the glass. Basically, it created a series of hand-holds. But it didn't try to escape right then, knowing we were keeping a close eye on it. It waited for the right moment when our backs were turned."

"Wouldn't it run out of handholds first?" Doogie asked. "We never let it get more than three-quarters of the way to the top."

"That would be true if it had to actually touch the glass to apply the goop. Besides smearing it on, it could also fling tiny droplets ahead of it."

"Like slinging a loogie," Mason offered.

"That's one way of putting it," Skunkworks said. "But roughly accurate. It happens so quick you can't see it with the naked eye."

Of course you can't, Mason thought. All the interesting stuff happened in insect-time. Damn. He should have been the one to catch that. He had been working his way through the slow-time sequences in chronological order and hadn't yet reached the most recent footage.

The rest of the team was duly impressed, even Gabby, who had been in on the experiment. WOW, she wrote.

Scientific curiosity had so far kept Corny's anger in check, but she wasn't about to let Skunkworks and Gabby off the hook so easily. "So that's pretty amazing and all, but shouldn't we have discussed this first? I thought we decided to hold off on experiments until after we got the scan results back?"

"Technically, we said until lunch," Skunkworks pointed out.

Her gaze flicked from Skunkworks to Gabby then back again. "You two have been planning this for a while, haven't you? That's why you didn't want us running other experiments. It would have interfered with your little coup."

We didn't want to get anyone else in hot water if something went wrong, ran Gabby's response.

"You kept it a secret from Major Zeus too?"

Yes.

Something in Skunkworks' reaction tipped Corny off. "You told him, didn't you?"

Wait, you told him?

"Of course he did," Corny said. "Didn't you know? Skunkworks is his eyes and ears in this operation. No one sneezes on the Bridge without the major knowing about it."

"It's not like that," Skunkworks said. "The major and I have a history. I can sell him on ideas he might not otherwise go for. And if something goes ass end up then I can take the fall for it and keep the rest of you from getting burned. Whatever else this place may be, it's still a military operation and screw ups can have long term, shall we say, occupational hazards."

"Oh, I see, so you were just trying to protect us," Corny said scathingly. "Well, knock it the fuck off. We're all consenting adults here. And even if turns out we are just beta testers for some next-gen military micro-stalker, I demand to be treated with the respect owed by one scientific colleague to another. No more father-knows-best, paternalistic bullshit. Kapish?"

"Clear as mud," Skunkworks said.