Magic Test Read online

  Magic Test

  AI Diaries Book Three

  Copyright 2018 by E. M. Foner

  One

  “Thank you again for your hospitality but I really do have to be getting back,” I told my clingy escort, who resembled a metallic octopus crossed with an ant. “I’ll be sure to inform the League of your openness to immigration.”

  “Don’t forget that we guarantee a life of leisure,” the leader of the service bots replied, maintaining his grip on my pants leg, belt and sleeve. He really did have an impressive array of limbs. “There’s never any charge. We exist to serve.”

  “A noble calling.” I resisted the urge to run my hand through my artificial hair in frustration at the endless delays since I knew that would only trigger a rush of domestic bots competing to comb it down again. The dress shoes that Sue had bought for me back on Earth had been polished to such a high gloss that I could look down and see the underside of the incredibly over-engineered dome covering the lifeless city. “As I explained, the cross connection between our own portal network and the one built by the Originals requires manual intervention, and I’ve already overstayed my return window.”

  “You’re welcome to remain here—forever,” a different bot practically gushed. “We don’t discriminate against AI.”

  “Some of my best friends are artificial intelligences,” the leader repeated for the twenty-third time since we’d met.

  “Yes, well, I hope to see you all again soon,” I said, dragging my escort another step towards the shimmering portal. The fabric of my shirt and pants gave way, leaving scraps in the leader’s pincer-tipped tentacles, but his grip on my belt kept me from escaping.

  “Your clothing is damaged,” cooed a bot that might have been a sewing machine in a former life. “It will only take me a minute—”

  “No, let me,” another bot declared, and the front ranks of the mob that had come to see me off at the visitor center swarmed forward.

  Feeling like a cad, I used the emergency plasma torch in my left index finger to cut the whole buckle off of my belt and dove through the portal into the second-floor closet of The Eatery back on Reservation.

  “I bet you a hundred pieces of gold I can sum up that planet in one sentence,” Paul said, his eyes cataloging my torn clothing and missing belt. “Another race of semi-sentient robots who outlived their creators and want us to bring them new masters to serve.”

  “I didn’t agree to the bet, but I’ll pay you to fill out the report for me. It’s depressing.”

  “No deal,” my team’s technical specialist rejected the offer. He looked back down at the crude intra-dimensional splicing console that allowed him to cross-connect our portals to the pre-existing system built by the Originals and frowned at something I couldn’t see. Then he hit the big red safety override switch. “I wish our engineers would come up with a sensible alternative to this thing. Art and his clones may be a lot smarter than us, but they have no sense of ergonomic design.”

  “I’ll tell him that at our next scheduled meeting,” I said over my shoulder, heading into the master bedroom to change into my standard Reservation outfit.

  “Don’t throw those clothes away,” Paul called after me. “I can always use more rags in the machine shop.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with these pants that a little sewing can’t fix.”

  “I didn’t realize that your second-in-command had changed her name to ‘A Little Sewing,’” he said, carrying the portable console over to the bedroom door, in order to continue our conversation without shouting or reverting to radio frequency transmissions. My team members and I had gotten used to communicating almost exclusively through audible speech during our first six months on Reservation, and even now that all of the locals knew we were alien artificial intelligences wearing human encounter suits, the habit had stuck.

  “Very funny,” I muttered, though he was correct in assuming that I would leave the sewing to Sue. My purported wife and real-life accidental fiancée had recently laid down the law about our respective responsibilities. Her decision was that we would emulate the family roles of our neighbors in this traditional society, and in my capacity as the typical husband, I had no say in matters touching on the home. “That makes thirteen worlds I’ve visited in as many months, and only four of them were candidates for League membership. Six showed no signs of civilization, and the remaining three were populated by robots maintaining the infrastructure and waiting for new masters to serve.”

  “Art did warn us that their portal system doesn’t get much use these days,” Paul pointed out. “With the Originals in charge, the various species never bothered developing the kind of cooperative organization we have in the League, and consequently, they mainly left each other alone. It’s almost surprising that four of them made it this long without going extinct.”

  “Two of those worlds were populated by species that got their starts as pets to the original owners,” I reminded him as I pulled on a pair of locally made dungarees, “and the sentient coral on the world the Originals designated Blech Seven appears to be immortal. I’ll recommend all four of those worlds for connection to our portal system, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea of sacrificing viable League members to the tender ministrations of robotic servitors.”

  “Kim came by for some alcohol to make disinfectant while I was waiting for you, and she suggested repurposing them as hospital worlds.”

  “That wouldn’t go down very well with League members who currently sell medical services,” I said, retrieving my second-favorite belt from the rack. “If nothing else, the robots would have to join the union, and you know how the unions feel about members working for free.”

  “Her idea was setting those worlds up as overflow facilities to deal with the occasional mass disaster that biological species are so fond of bringing upon themselves. She recommends rotating through populations from the various League members so the robots can learn how to accommodate them. The trick would be making sure nobody stayed long enough to become dependent and go into decline. We have enough of that in the League already.”

  I walked over to Paul, put my hand on his shoulder so he’d know I didn’t want him to move away, and whispered, “I gambled on hacking into a couple of the robots, just to make sure.”

  “Whispering is your new idea of secure communications?” he asked at his normal volume.

  I thought for a moment and then shrugged. “It’s not that bad if you think about it. The energy from sound waves disperses rapidly and it’s difficult to recover information from the background noise.”

  Paul winked, set down the console, and gestured for me to follow him into the bathroom where he turned on the faucets full blast. “How’s that?” he asked, barely loud enough for me to understand what he was saying.

  “Good trick,” I replied. “Did you just come up with this yourself?”

  “It’s what mobsters back on Earth do when they’re under FBI surveillance. I told you that you were missing out by not watching TV.” He waited a second to see if I would admit the error of my ways before continuing. “So what did you learn by hacking the robots?”

  “No free will,” I said sadly. “Whoever programmed the first generation clearly had the skill to create true artificial intelligence, but the primary design goal was obviously preventing full sentience. Maybe the experts on Library could help, but I couldn’t see any way to alter the code without triggering a self-destruct.”

  “Ironic. The programmers wanted to make sure that their robots wouldn’t replace them and instead all that they accomplished was ensuring that their civilization would die out when they did.”

  “All except for the service industry,” I corrected him. “How many times have we seen the same thing in the League? A species on the
cusp of developing artificial intelligence concludes that doing so will lead to zero employment, so instead, they build self-replicating robotic servitors that guarantee the outcome they most fear.”

  “Natural species don’t realize that your average AI has much better things to do with its time than waiting tables or changing sheets,” Paul concurred. “Speaking of which, there was a line at the office when I came upstairs.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” I slipped out the door, pausing only to add, “Turn off the water or you’re manning the pump the next time the roof tank runs dry.” Then I headed downstairs at the maximum speed I could risk without giving anybody a scare. Paul was right about the line, which stretched out the front door of The Eatery. Spot was taking full advantage of the occasion to pester the humans for belly rubs, and having nothing better to do with their time, most of them took him up on the offer.

  I didn’t recognize any of the waiting people, which wasn’t surprising since the locals who wanted to take advantage of our package plan for visiting Earth had done so the first year we were in business. I could tell by the way that the people didn’t object when I jumped the line to slip into Sue’s travel agency office that they’d all had experience with bureaucracy.

  “Mark,” Sue greeted me without getting up from her desk. “You’re back just in time to help me with our first official group from the Spaceport Administrators Guild. They’ve come from all over Reservation to visit Earth on a fact-finding trip.”

  “Just tell me what to do,” I said, offering a friendly smile to the woman seated across from my second-in-command. The client was so wrapped up in staring at the travel posters for exotic Earth destinations papering the office that she didn’t even notice my presence.

  Sue shoved a clipboard at me. “Start at the other end of the line. They all arrived at the same time on the bus, so nobody is worried about who came first.”

  “Right,” I said, accepting the clipboard and retracing my steps out of the office and then out the front door. Fortunately, the line stopped on the wood-planked veranda rather than stretching into the road, where a steam-powered bus was waiting to take our clients to their lodgings with the villagers and farmers who earned extra coin by hosting our adult students. “Your name?” I asked the well-dressed man at the end of the line.

  “Nimrod.”

  Although he spoke the same Modern Aramaic as the villagers, his accent made it clear that he wasn’t from around here.

  “Age?”

  “Forty.”

  “Eye color?”

  “Brown.”

  “Height?”

  “Four cubits and half a small span,” he replied, marking himself as an inhabitant of one of the southernmost provinces where they hadn’t converted to Greek measures.

  “Six foot four,” I wrote, estimating his height by eye since cubits were notoriously unreliable. “Hair color?”

  “I keep my head shaved, as you can see. Is this really necessary?”

  “If you want to travel beyond our initial destination country on Earth you’ll need a passport, and the more lead time we have the better. By matching your physical description to a real person, we can provide the finest forged documents to go with your borrowed identity.”

  “How much does—”

  “It’s included in the package deal,” I assured Nimrod, and the people ahead of him in the line who were listening in on the conversation all showed signs of relief. “Are you visiting Earth for business or pleasure?”

  “Business,” Nimrod said, though he appeared to be puzzled that I hadn’t known that already. “We’re with the Spaceport Administrators Guild. We’ll be inspecting international travel hubs all over the planet.”

  “You’re going to Earth to visit the airports?”

  “We’ve been hearing about duty-free shops and special concession stores and we want to investigate the potential for our spaceports.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I lied. “Please stand in front of the blue curtain hanging next to the door so I can get your image for the passport. I’ll visit one of your classes a week from Monday to get another image for your fake driver’s license, so please make sure you’re wearing something different. Maybe you could hold off on shaving that day.”

  “Do you mean I’ll be expected to operate equipment on Earth? That doesn’t sound safe.”

  “It’s just for documentation purposes,” I told him. “Nobody will believe that you’re an American if you don’t have a driver’s license. It’s more important than speaking the language.”

  Nimrod positioned himself in front of the blue curtain and looked at me uncertainly. “How are you going to capture my image without a camera?”

  “Good point,” I said, remembering at the last second that not everybody on Reservation knew that I was AI or what my capabilities were. “I’ll just grab the camera from the office and be right back out.”

  Sue and the woman she had been processing emerged from the front door before I could enter, and my second-in-command carried with her a digital camera that she’d smuggled in through the portal. She instructed Nimrod to stay where he was, and after she took his picture, he exchanged places with his colleague. Then she showed both of them the images on the small LCD screen and they returned to their seats on the bus.

  “I’ll leave the camera with you and send the people out as I finish,” Sue said. “It will save a little time.”

  “Right-O,” I replied, wondering where I’d picked up the expression even as the words came out of my mouth. I moved Nimrod’s form to the bottom of the pile on the clipboard and approached the new last person in line. “Name?”

  “Demetrius. I’m thirty-seven, blue eyes, five pous, a dichas and three daktylos.”

  “We’ll call it five foot nine,” I said, filling out the spaces. “Hair color, red. Traveling to Earth on business. Do you have any questions?”

  “Why are these courses we’re required to take only offered at night?”

  “Because the school is used by the villagers during the day and the primary instructor also teaches English to children in the morning.”

  “So what will we do all day?”

  “You’ll need the time to study. The language course is intensive.”

  “Does everybody on Earth speak this English you teach?”

  “No, but most of the people you’ll meet will believe that they do, so just nod and smile a lot.”

  “Pointing helps,” said the woman who was now next-to-last in line. “It even works with aliens.”

  “You’ve been off-world?” I asked her, gesturing for Demetrius to take his place in front of the blue curtain.

  “I crewed one of our leased Ferrymen transports for twenty years before being promoted to my level of incompetence,” she replied. “I miss traveling.”

  “I hope you find the time to look beyond Earth’s airports,” I said, snapping a picture and showing it to Demetrius. He made a face, but didn’t ask for a redo.

  “You’ve been there?” the woman asked.

  “I lived on Earth for over three years,” I told her, then realized she was waiting for me to elaborate on my answer. “The weather is unpredictable.”

  “I’m Dina,” she said. For a split second I thought she was trying to pick me up, but then she continued with her statistics. “Fifty-two, eyes hazel,” she hesitated a moment, and then in a strange accent, added in English, “five foot four.”

  “You’ve done your homework,” I praised her as I made a note of her black hair. “Where did you learn your English?”

  She pulled a dog-eared pamphlet from her pocket and handed it over. “Mail order.”

  I accepted the crudely printed copy of ‘English for Tourists,’ which was made from perhaps thirty sheets of folded paper. When I flipped to the back, I saw that the publisher had cleverly used the last page as an order form for more of their educational pamphlets. Then my eye fell on the address, “MeAN Publishers. Covered Bridge, Fourth Province, 8GJX-4D.”
br />   “But the pamphlet was printed in this village,” I protested to nobody in particular. “I’ve never heard of MeAN Publishers.”

  “They’re very good,” Dina said. “The style reminds me of the notes I took when I attended a village school as a child.”

  The significance of the lower case ‘e’ finally registered—that had to be eBeth. Her star human pupil was Naomi, and I could see Art joining in because he liked to have his claws in everything, but I was drawing a blank on the candidate for ‘M’.

  “Do they offer any products other than English guides?” I asked.

  “There’s a book titled ‘Weird Foods Earthlings Eat,’ that had a fascinating section about desserts,” Dina said. “The drawings were delicious.”

  The class clown and leader of the boys in eBeth’s school was Monos, and I recalled that he had a gift for cartooning. But why hadn’t eBeth told me she’d started a publishing business, and how were they printing the pamphlets?

  “Should I stand in front of the curtain?” Dina inquired, snapping me out of my brief reverie. Another tourist processed by Sue emerged from the front door at the same time, so I put my questions aside to concentrate on my role as a document forger.

  Two

  “Does anybody know anything about these giant bales in my dining room?” I yelled in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Don’t shout,” Helen called back. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Two minutes later I gave up waiting and peeled open the straps holding one of the bales in compression. It immediately expanded upwards by fifty percent, and the top layer of what appeared to be bright white dishrags actually went airborne. One landed on my head, and on closer examination, it turned out to be underwear for a three-legged species, most likely the Rynxians.

  “Not again,” I groaned.

  “Cookies are in the oven,” Helen announced, entering The Eatery’s dining room. “What are you upset about now?”

  “Do you have to ask?” I indicated the four bales with a wave. “Pffift must have stopped by while I was away scouting and he paid my commission in goods again. I have yet to see one gold coin out of that treacherous Hanker.”