Interrogative 01: Tiago and the Masterless by Charles Barouch Read Free Book Online Page B

she had him. Audra was wrong. She'd overplayed her part. Tiago wasn't attending the pity party anymore, but he wasn't where she wanted him either.
    "You have an excellent point," he said with a menacing tone. "I'm in command. You'll go. Interrogative. I'm done with Six-six-four."

Chapter Seven: Control
    Captain's Log: Ship's Day 616.
    I disassembled Audra yesterday. I need some time alone while I finish my plan. I was a fool to consider going to the dome. That's what expendables do. The captain isn't expendable. Audra said it herself: I'm all the purpose the ship has left.
     
    Tiago installed the brainless maker on repair shuttle number three. He had to remove the other five seats to put it where he wanted it, but that wasn't a problem. If he ever had enough crew to warrant a co-pilot, he'd just use a different shuttle. It couldn't be mounted in the shuttle's storage area, because that space would have to hold the raw materials and the finished goods. The storage area was small to begin with, being designed for repair, not for general transport.
    With breaks for food and sleep, it took him just over two days to get everything nailed down. That meant that the hardware, sans brains, was in place. The software was another matter, as was the hardware for the remote control. It wasn't working at all as he had expected.
    There were a lot of routines which he had thought were artifactual code that weren't. A lot of the scanner/builder interface was hard-coded for speed. Whoever wrote it was a genius at optimizing code but a horror at documenting anything. Variable re-use was so high that he could hardly track any aspect of the control code.
    He wanted to meet the software designer, pat him on the back for the speed and efficiency of the code, and then strangle him for the complexity of the same code. By the end of the third day since he'd last disassembled Six-six-four, he was in desperate need of a break. It was time to bring his friend back and see if she'd require a reset before she'd be his friend.
    Tiago cleaned up the work area first. He was trying to regain his social habits and this seemed like a good time to put that into practice. When everything was tidied up, he sat on the steps in the open doorway of the shuttle. He could easily talk to both ships from where he was.
    "RS3. Shutdown the maker unit. Interrogative. Instantiate Audra."
    He watched as she was built, layer by layer, in a standing position. When the process was done, she glared at him. While resetting her was not off the table, it was harder to think about doing so when she was in the room. He decided to try another way.
    "I'm sorry, Audra. I shouldn't have yelled at you and I shouldn't have disassembled you."
    "Again," she added.
    "I shouldn't have disassembled you again," he agreed.
    Her emotions were not pre-programmed guile this time. He was stable, or at least seemed so. That left her in social mode. Six-six-four looked past him, peering into the shuttle. It did not improve her mood.
    "I thought we were going to figure that out together," she said.
    "We are. I still don't have it working."
    That softened her a little. He did need her. He'd apologized and admitted he needed her help. For a sim, especially one that had been modified as she was, being useful triggered all sorts of positive feedback loops. She was still angry. Being ignored was offensive to her core personality. He hadn't talked to her once while her body was gone.
    "So, I help you and you disassemble me again?" she asked.
    "I promised I wouldn't."
    He wanted the words back as soon as he said them.
    "Not my place to tell you who you can disassemble. I'm just a sim. I'm not supposed to have a body anyway. That was your idea," Audra said.
    Tiago was taken aback, and not just because he felt awful for treating her like this. He was starting to realize how many emotions she had seemed to master recently. He knew perhaps seventy percent of her code. She shouldn't hold that many surprises.
    "I