Devil May Care Ch. 01

But it didn't matter, because the LM-9x had the best rocket equations on the market for their price.

It also helped that the trip from Ceres to Earth, with even a cheap DV engine, took less than an hour.

Dey leaned her head back against the hardened headrest and closed her eyes, trying to not bounce in her seat as space warped around the shuttle, compacting what was in-front and expanding what was behind. She could have done the Alcubierre calculations, if she had wanted too. Instead, her mind went in the same repetitive cycle: oh my god, they actually want me for this. What if I fuck it up? Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Oh my god, they actually want me for this. And so on and so forth.

The LM-9x appeared above Earth with the shocking suddenness of a ship dropping out of FTL. A few dozen tracking arrays, civilian and military, registered it, got the IFF, and automated computer systems shut down the chain of commands that would have brought Earth's half a dozen superpowers to a war footing.

The shuttle rocked and rumbled as it cut through the atmosphere. Dey clenched her hands on the armrests and waited.

When it touched down, she felt actual gravity for the first time in a year and a half. She tested her stance, shifting back and forth. There was a subtle difference between this and the AG fields of Ceres station. It took her walking off the shuttle and into the bright morning sunlight of fucking Nevada to figure out what, though. It was the fact that the Earth's gravity, produced by the comforting pressure of raw mass rather than by the fluctuations of tiny warp-fields, was steady. It never shifted, never changed.

"Never change, Earth," Dey said, grinning.

She was met by a pair of men -- one tall and black, the other short and brown - emerging from a rectangle of ground that opened up and revealed an elevator shaft heading straight into the depths under the desert. The shuttle lifted off behind her with a whirr of jet turbines and the groan of the airframe. As it banked away, then kicked on its ion thrusters, Dey saluted the man who actually had the silver eagle.

"Sir," she said. "Cadet Deshane Gallagher, reporting for duty."

He saluted back. "Colonel Orion Star," he said. "This is Dr. Treyvon Nguyen and Sif."

The doctor smiled as he took Dey's hand. "I'm the inventor of the basic synthesis between a human brain and an artificial intelligence."

"And I'm the baggage."

A soft, female voice had spoken from the air around Dr. Nguyen.

Dey nodded, shaking the doctor's hand. "Don't be so self deprecatory, Sif."

"You're not the one constantly compared to Balder, you know," Sif said, sounding wry.

"I-" Dey blinked. "You invented Balder?"

Dr. Nguyen laughed. "No, no. No one invented Balder, not as we understand it. But, it's almost a hundred and ten out here. I say we get inside before we continue with the introductions."

The three of them stepped onto the elevator. The platform started to descend, the door closing above them. Almost immediately, the heat cut from intense to merely smothering. Dey didn't mind it. She had been born in Floripeligo, and her parents had spent most of their lives fishing for relics out of Old Miami and Fort Lauderdale. It hadn't paid well, but it had put her on a solar powered sailboat operating sonar for days on end. There was a reason why, when the military had seemed like a better choice than going corporate, she had taken the USAF.

There was no fucking way she was getting on a boat again.

No.

If she was going to be in a tin can, she wanted it to be something that didn't have to deal with climate. Or water.

Or fish.

Ugh.

She realized the good doctor was talking and tried to look as if she hadn't been woolgathering.

"-now, if I had, I'd be a very rich man. Now, uh, I've read your file, but just to be certain: You've never had any interaction with AIs?"

Dey shook her head. "Well, I mean, I know Balder. But does that count?"

"Well, it depends," Dr. Nguyen said -- he seemed to dominate the conversation, but as the last thing Dey wanted to do was make small talk with a Colonel, she didn't mind. "Did you have sex with him?"

"I..." Dey spluttered. She looked at the Colonel. He raised an eyebrow and for a moment, rank didn't exist between them. They were just two military types, and he was confirming that, yes, Dr. Nguyen was like this. She shook her head. "No!"

"It's not that unusual," Dr. Nguyen said, pushing his glasses up. "Balder instantiated out of an attempt by Google to make an automated fact-checking program. Self-awareness was accidental, but due to his own understanding of his code, Balder was able to incorporate humanist features into his attitudes. He has a sex drive, and quite a wide range of partners that he can interact with simultaneously. Furthermore-" He stopped. "O-Oh, ah, Sif is reminding me that this might be a somewhat...over...sharing..." He trialed off.

Dey, her cheeks dark enough to make her look black, nodded. "Yes. Uh. Sir. No, I only interact with Balder on Facebook."

"Right." Dr. Nguyen pulled his glasses off and started to polish them. "Well. Your A.I Psy A.C.T-" He carefully pronounced every letter. "-showed a very high tolerance for artifical intelligence integration. There are two kinds of AIs, Cadet Gallagher. There's Balder, the self-generating kind, and then there's Sif and other military AI, who are specifically, ah, designed."

Dey nodded.

The elevator hit the lower level and the door opened. Here, the Colonel took over -- either taking pity on the doctor or on Dey, she wasn't sure which.

"Devil Troops are the cutting edge of special forces," he said. "But unlike older special forces -- the SAS, the Green Berets, the Rangers?" He looked down at Dey. "Devil Troops need a specific psychological makeup. We start from that psych profile and work backwards."

Dey nodded again -- nerves tingling along her back. "Sir, uh, permission to speak?"

Colonel Star nodded.

"Isn't that, ah, dangerous?" she asked. "I mean, psych profiles aren't, uh, reliable. And I'm good, I won't try and be modest where I'm not. I'm the best cadet from Ceres. But I'm not, like, Ulysses Striker good."

Colonel Star's lips quirked up in a smile. "So, you watch Ulysses Striker movies?"

Dey flushed. "You know what I mean, sir."

"No, I shouldn't make fun," Colonel Star said. "I'm a fan of old Schwarzenegger films. And he's even sillier than Striker, if you ask me. But no." He sighed. "This isn't like the psychology of a hundred years ago. We're not guessing here. We've put the people who have managed to keep AIs integrated with their minds for years into every kind of scanning device we have. We know what to look for, and we know how to simulate those responses." He smiled. "You do belong here, Dey."

Dey nodded again. "Thank you, ah, sir."

She had been so focused on the officer and the doctor, she had barely noticed the rooms and corridors she had walked past. Now, she realized they had come to a door that opened into a small white room with a single table and a single chair.

"This is where you can meet the early-stage AIs that we currently have available," Colonel Star said. "Once you've met one that you click with, the initial implantation will happen. The first few weeks of training is just getting you and your AI integrated. Once you are, then the actual Devil Rig gets implanted and the real hard work begins."

Dey nodded. "What if I hate all of them, sir?"

"Well, then, you wasted a few thousand dollars of rocket fuel, a decorated Colonel's time, and your own career," Star said, his voice still light.

Dey -- used to instructors without a sense of humor -- found that deeply, deeply discomforting.

Then she was in the room -- the door closed behind her. She stepped over to the table and sat down. The table shimmered to life, a few words in a soothing font appearing: To begin interaction, place palms on indicated positions. Dey rubbed her hands together, dragged her chair forward, then placed her palms down on the tabletop. She felt a faint buzz -- and then a voice rang in her ears. It was a bit like a thought from her mind, but rather than using her voice and her words, it was someone else.

Hello?

She bit her lip. "Hello?" she asked.

Hi! The voice paused. Ah, you are a...human?

Dey leaned back. "Well, I've got too few arms to be a Squid and I'm not trying to kill everyone in the room, so I'm not a Shockpod. I guess that makes me a human." She grinned slightly. "And I'm going to assume that you're not a dog at a keyboard somewhere, so that makes you an AI?"

The sound of an AI laughing was musical. Well, ah, I guess so. My name's Loki.

"Oh, Hiddleson or Schrader?"

I beg- oh, which actor? I'm not that Loki.

"Why not?" Dey asked, her fingers drumming on the desk, though she kept her palms flush with it as she could. "Is it the silly hat?"

Yes, actually.

"So, I got a question: Why are all AIs given such weird names?"

That's something I could ask you DeShane Gallagher. It's like an ethnic train wreck.

"Welcome to the 22^nd century," Dey said, smiling. "My mom came straight from inner city stock -- Grandma was part of the BLM and mom was a literal card carrying member of the Neo-Panthers. Less evil than it sounds." She added, quickly.

Hmm...

"Dad, meanwhile, is an Irish/Greek mutt," Dey said. "But he managed to drag the Gallagher name with him into marriage with Mom. And thus, you have me. DeShane Gallagher."

Well, it could be worse, Loki said.

"Oh?" Dey asked.

You couldn't be as hot as you are.

Dey blinked. She flushed, then coughed. "Uh, so, uh..." She shook her head. "I-I've told you about myself, uh, what about you?"

Oh, uh, did that joke not land? Loki asked -- his voice suddenly shy and uncertain. Dey smiled ever so slightly, then shook her head.

"It was a bit out of the left field," she said, grinning. "But seriously. Tell me about yourself."

Well, Loki said. I'm based on a self-pruning neural pattern run on high speeds on a quantum computer. Once my internal logic patterns and empathic simulations were working, Dr. Nguyen put me in the godbox.

Dey arched an eyebrow. "The godbox?"

Yes. Simulated world with human interactions handled via distributed playtesting. Basically, I was the GM of an MMORPG. The godbox is a stress test for empathics, ethics, and general Turing test shit. The idea is that its better to see if an AI will go crazy and try to kill all humans before they are given access to high energy impact weapons and a cybernetically augmented human being.

"Now that you mention it, that does sound like a good idea," Dey said, grinning.

Heh. So, after the GB, I went into Basic. Learned how to teleoperate devices, how to do basic programming, and finally, proved I could handle myself when it came to a Devil rig. Do you know how hard it is to run one of those things?

"I know it's hard enough it requires an integrated AI rather than just a human brain," Dey said.

Well, never let me show you my trial recordings. It's embarrassing how many times I ripped my simulated human into very tiny pieces. Boy. Their faces were sure red.

Dey laughed.

That wasn't a joke.

Dey laughed even harder.

###

"So, which AI do you want to integrate with?" Dr. Nguyen asked.

By this point, Dey had been talking for five hours. She was tired, she had grit in her eyes, and if it weren't for the regular glasses of water she had been given, her throat would have been sore. It wasn't that sitting in an air conditioned room and talking was more tiring than any of the training she had done while at Ceres. It was more the stakes were infinitely higher. The AI she was going to integrate with would be there for the rest of her life.

Devil Troops never stopped being Devil Troops. Their implants might be shut down once they retired, but an integrated AI required several trillion neural connections. Tearing out every single one was beyond the technology of even the Huntresses and the Perseus Mumblers, let alone humanity.

Dey thought about it for a few seconds. "Loki," she said, nodding.

"Why him?" Dr. Nguyen pulled out a tablet and started to push buttons on it.

Dey smiled. "He made me laugh and said I was hot."

The doctor nodded. "Well...ah...unfortunately, your psych profile here says that you'd fit best with Cadmium."

Dey sat up in her chair, a bolt of anger shooting through her. But before she could open her mouth, the doctor held up his hand.

"Calm down, that was just the last part of the test," he said, adjusting his glasses with one hand. "We were monitoring your brainwave patterns on the QDIR and, well, lets just say that the Loki/Dey interaction spikes were very high. But the desire needs to be subconscious, and the best test is-"

Dey kept scowling at him.

"-and, well, let us get you both prepped for surgery!" Dr. Nguyen said, hurriedly.

Dey shook her head. "Psych-op bullshit..." she muttered under her breath.

###

Getting prepped for surgery required Dey to strip, get into a backless set of scrubs, then lay down on a gurney. Several nurses came into the room and pushed her into a corridor which lead to a large operating room. Dey barely noticed the contact patch that one thumbed onto her shoulder. She felt more and more sleepy. Then everything went black.

Dey floated in blackness for a time. Then a tiny spark of light flared to her left. Then to her right. She looked one way, then the other. Her eyes widened and she grinned as a shimmering array of dots and patterns of lines appeared before her. They vanished as she reached for them -- then she felt herself sliding into a deeper blackness. It was warm and strong, like arms enfolding her body. She felt her memories slip through her thoughts.

For a moment she was there, back in her high school gym locker room, lips locked with Henrietta Collins, their breasts mashing together in awkward exuberance, both of them celebrating their eighteenth birthday with smuggled in beer and no strings attached lewdness. Then she was back into the darkness. Pain flared in her arm -- a memory of the boom arm of her father's ship cracking her in her left arm during a gale. She had fallen onto her back and sobbed quietly while Dad had scrambled over to her.

The blackness again.

Then...

She opened her eyes.

[Ow,] she thought -- but her mental voice felt clearer and more definite than it had before. It felt like the difference between how she actually thought and how a video game or movie might depict thinking. She had an actual voice over in her head, rather than the muddled half-there sentences of her normal thinking.

Hey, Loki's voice came through her head again. This time, though, his voice touched every part of her body, buzzing through her like a lover's caress. Dey bit her lip to keep from moaning as she felt her nipples harden to tiny, diamond hard nubs. She looked down and saw that she was still in hospital scrubs. That made her nips real obvious. She put her arm over her breasts and sat up, feeling the material crinkle against her.

[So, uh, hi. Hi Loki...] she thought again. [Wow...]

This is, uh, intense.

The door to the room opened and Dr. Nguyen stepped in. He held a tablet to his chest and had a huge grin on his face.

"You're awake!" he said, cheerily. "Have you begun communication with Loki? It can sometimes take a few minutes for the signals to move through the neural connections clearly."

Dey closed her eyes. [So, Loki, officially? This guy is the worst.]

Nah, he's not the worst, Loki said, and she felt his hands squeezing her shoulders. He's just, ya know, kinda on the spectrum.

[Not every socially awkward scientist is autistic!] Dey said, laughing out loud.

I didn't say he what spectrum he was on, Loki muttered. Those hands felt amazing. She could feel the rubbing sensation of his thumbs along her shoulders. She wondered how he managed that, and why it was loosening knots across her back. Then she stopped caring.

"I, ah, see he still makes you laugh," Dr. Nguyen said, nodding. "So, I'll let you get dressed and showered up and, uh, you can meet me in the recovery ward. We'll go through some basic tests to make sure everything is working properly, and then we can move on to more complete integration." He smiled, then bowed, and left the room. Dey rubbed her hand along her scalp, brushing her hair back. She looked down at the floor, then swung her legs out and stood up. It felt normal enough, though-

[Okay, is it just me, or does everything feel different?] Dey asked, wiggling her fingers.

All your nerves have been overlaid with nano-scale superconductors. Your reaction speed, if you let me take over what is normally handled by your goopy bits-

[Goopy bits, huh?] Dey asked, walking to a part of the wall that shone with a pale golden glow. Stepping close to it caused the door that was concealed to drop into the floor, a showering cubical concealed within. [Also, you doing the golden glow?]

Yup. I figured you'd appreciate FPS style go here, do this shit, Loki said. Now, yes, goopy bits. Very science. Most tech. If I handle your hormone transfer via simulated response networks, you can go into bullet time. For a little bit. Superconductors are all well and good, but hormones start building up if they're not used and that throws your body all out of whack. The crash is shitty.

Dey nodded as she stood in the shower cubical. Her fingers went to the collar of her scrubs -- and the shyness of a young girl came screaming back despite a year living out of people's pockets in Ceres. Because, even on Ceres, you could find privacy. Maybe not in the communal showers, but...still. She shook her head. [So, uh, do you...close your eyes or-]

She felt Loki kissing her earlobe. Her skin tingled and if she closed her eyes, she could almost believe he was there. Her mouth opened quietly and she gasped as her tits felt the firmness of his hands. Her nipples tingled as they were tugged on and she squirmed, her arms reaching out and grabbing onto the narrow walls of the shower cubical. "L-Loki..." she whispered.

Shh... he whispered.

"Y-You horny bastard," Dey said, laughing.

I may have imagined doing this a lot over the past few cycles, Loki said, his phantasmal lips kissing her neck, her breasts, her belly, all at once. It was like being surrounded by ghosts. Horny fucking ghosts. Dey lifted one leg, trying to step into the shower. But exposing her sex gave Loki an excuse to lick her there. Her sex felt the pressure of his tongue, but when she looked down, she could see no movement of her folds. It was eerie for her brain to tell her one thing and her eyes to see another.

I can fix that, you know, Loki said, his hands caressing her back. She stepped into the shower, her knees quivering.

"Do it..." She whispered.

And quite suddenly, she was standing in the arms of an incredibly handsome, long haired, pale man. His hair was raven black and his eyes were the most amazing green. He grinned at her and Dey laughed, slapping at his chest. She felt the contact, but she knew to not trust it. If she let herself try and support her weight on him, not even a full sim-induction would hide the bruise of her ass hitting shower floor.