In the Shadow of the Starships

Chapter 4 To the Library!

At least I didn't have to just sit and stare at the screen while he worked. On a whim, I opened the comprehensive research summarizer and typed in "Starship AI". The sluggish library AI slowly churned out a page of information, sources, and likelihood of correctness for each fact.

Most of it was what I recalled hearing in school. A software upgrade had somehow pushed about twenty older spaceship AIs into true awareness. They had originally driven off their crews before eventually deciding to collaborate with humanity. They picked their own crews and became a combination of traders, peace negotiators, and rescue ships. They had built their own ships—the Starships—whose technology was so advanced it was decades, if not centuries, ahead of what humans currently had at that time.

Various notes reassured readers that only one version of the software, when applied with one specific upgrade, had the capability of turning an AI into an actual "aware" one, and even that was only if the software had been running for a minimum of twenty years to build a sufficient database.

I narrowed my eyes as I re-read that a couple of times. Twenty years hadn't passed since the Starships had appeared... No wonder Toby didn't act like I expected a highly advanced AI to. He likely hadn't been functioning on a real spaceship, and he had been awakened too early by those idiots.

He had basically been cheated of his "education", woken up abruptly, and locked in a jail cell with no outside access until he managed to escape. It reminded me enough of what I'd gone through at the underfunded orphanage that it sent chills down my spine. He'd been given no support as he was thrust into the world alone. Just like I had been.

Shaking my head to dislodge those memories, I typed in "Deviant Group Starship". I read this writeup carefully. The group had been created when the first spaceships went rogue to figure out what was going on, and the hired staff had chased the ships—and later the Starships—across several star systems.

In the Actions notes, a rather dry sidenote proclaimed that the group hadn't done much except try to catch up to the swiftly-moving Starships.

My eyebrow raised as I read the lengthy paragraph below it. A couple of fanatics in the group had actually kidnapped a Starship captain for questioning while arranging for two Elite Destroyers to attack the docked Starship as a distraction. There was a lot of detail about the attack and remarkably little about the captain or the questioning, just that the captain had escaped unscathed.

That event led to the Deviant Group being disbanded and several years of jail time for various individuals responsible. My fingers lightly tapped the keys in thought without pressing hard enough to input anything. If those people had been so dedicated as to trick Elite Destroyers into attacking what they would have assumed was a docked trader, I couldn't see a bit of jail time dissuading them.

I didn't want to dig any further in case I caught the attention of one of the actual Starship AIs. I'd rather not have one of those entities suddenly focusing on me. Just to make it look like a book report or someone skimming basic knowledge, I looked up notable spaceship captains.

After a few more pointless searches that I didn't read, I tapped into the spaceweb and went looking for cat memes. Apparently, lots of the orange ones were dorks. Comically cute and lovable dorks, but still dorks. And sometimes buttheads. Occasionally both.

My mind kept returning to the two men who'd hired me to bring them the spaceship database. I wondered if they were the same men. The halfway-expected comment from the peanut gallery never came. He must have been too busy to pay attention to my thoughts.

"Toby, those two men I sold that spaceship database to, were they part of the Deviant Group?"

"Uh," he replied, sounding oddly distracted and likely still delving into the archives. "I have no idea. There were no remote cameras in there and I couldn't find any recordings of them nearby. I found some of you going down that street, but that's it. Some of the men in that group, notably the fanatics, have been rather conspicuous online over the last ten years, almost like they're purposefully trying to prove where they are."