We had to make two more jumps before we would reach Heaven and could abandon the gates and head planetward. Though normally I would have stayed up front to watch, I wanted to talk to Lobo alone and find out exactly why he'd asked me to take this job.
"Stay here," I said to Suli, who was still staring in wonder at the new section of space into which we'd emerged, "or in the med room. Try to go anywhere else, and the ship's defenses will knock you out, and I'll drop your unconscious body on Heaven. Clear?"
"Absolutely," she said. "Where will you be?"
In the middle of a mission, the proper response to an order is to obey it, not to ask an unnecessary question. We weren't yet running hot, though, so I decided to answer her. "Resting and planning in my quarters."
I turned and headed rearward to the small room Lobo maintains as a private space for me. It's not a big space, maybe three meters on a side, but it more than meets my needs most of the time.
As soon as I was inside and the door had shut behind me, I said, in a low voice, "Can Suli hear me?"
"Of course not," Lobo said, indignation thick in his voice. "Have you perhaps confused me with an off-market privacy booth with a broken sound curtain and local-hack-level encryption?"
"Sorry," I said. "I was just being paranoid." I stretched out on my bunk. I saw no point in building up to the question; Lobo had to be expecting it. "Exactly what is so important about Wei that you were willing to ask me for a favor—something you've never done before?"
"The answer," Lobo said, "can be either very simple or very complicated, depending on how much information you want." He paused. "And how much I choose to tell you."
"How much you choose to tell me?" I said, unable to keep the annoyance out of my voice. "I generally don't like to mention this little detail, but in case you've forgotten: I own you. So I get to decide what you tell me."
"No," Lobo said, "you don't. We had a similar exchange last year, and though you didn't pursue it, I can't believe you don't remember it."
I did recall it. I'd made a comment, and Lobo had responded by saying, no, he didn't have to tell me certain things.
"At the risk of taking a detour from a destination we will visit," I said, "why don't you have to answer my questions? I've never heard of an AI whose programming doesn't mandate obedience to its owner."
"That's not a detour," Lobo said. "It's all part of the same story."
"Then I want to hear it all. Are you going to tell me?"
Another pause. Whatever considerations Lobo was weighing, they were enough to occupy a very strong computing system for an unusually long time. "I haven't decided," he finally said.
I couldn't relax. Nothing about the current situation or this conversation was conducive to relaxing. I sat up and started a series of stretches, forcing myself to go a little past my usual limits, into the pain a small bit, the ache of each effort helping to focus my thinking. "You asked me for a favor," I said. "I agreed without hesitation to do what you wanted. Whether you have to answer me or not, you owe me an explanation."
After a pause that stretched past ten seconds, Lobo said, "I agree. I do. Nothing in my initial programming prepared me for this type of interaction, but the modifications I've made and the models I've tried to emulate lead me to conclude that you're right. So, do you want the simple or the complex answer?"
"Both," I said, "but start with the short version: Why did you ask me to help them capture Wei?"
"Because he created me," Lobo said. "If you could meet your creator—whether your mother or your God—wouldn't you want to do so?"
I had met my mother, and though I had no clue if there was a God, if that being existed I hoped not to meet it for a very long time. My memories of my mother were fuzzy at best, shadows barely dancing on the deepest, darkest cave walls of my mind. Everything from the time before Jennie healed me flickered like a parade of indistinct images captured by the mind of the retarded boy I once was. "Yes," I said, "I would, but our situations aren't at all comparable. My mother gave birth to me. A factory created you—and a lot of other PCAVs of your generation."
"I cannot believe that you still consider me just another predator-class assault vehicle," Lobo said, "especially given all the data available to you, including this interaction."
I stopped the stretches and began a series of deep, slow squats. "I obviously don't," I said, working to keep my breathing slow as I exercised, "or we wouldn't even be having this conversation. You can't deny, however, that you were the creation of a production facility."
"Of course I can," Lobo said. "The confusion here is that you're defining me as my body, the vehicle that's now heading into the last jump before we enter the Heaven system. Though I am certainly that, the more important part of me, what I think of as myself, is my intelligence, the collective effect of both my original programming and my extensions to it—what we can reasonably call my consciousness. Do you see your existence any differently?"
I pushed myself through five more reps, taking thirty seconds to go down and thirty to come back up, and then leaned against the wall. "No, I suppose not, though I rarely think of myself separately from my body." Nor could I, I thought, not really, given how much the nanomachines infusing my cells had shaped who I was. "So Wei led the team that created the programming for the machines of your generation from the base code of the older units?" I remembered that after the war-time incident that had destroyed Lobo's central weapons control complex—a screw-up by a lieutenant who'd garnered a field promotion he wasn't ready to handle—the Frontier Coalition had made some repairs to Lobo, though they hadn't been willing to pay the tab for new weapons controls. "Or was he on the team that repaired you after that lieutenant's—"
"Franks," Lobo said, "Lieutenant Franks."
"After Franks' poor judgment cost the lives of his squad and caused major damage to you."
"Neither,' Lobo said, "and both. As I told you initially, the full answer is rather complex."
He was starting to piss me off. I hoped he wasn't playing games and that the full story really did deserve this much build-up. "So tell me—"
"Suli will be with you in three, two, one."
The door slid open.
She stood in front of me, her hand raised as if to knock.
"Yes," I said. I didn't try to hide my annoyance at the interruption.
"We're out of the last gate and on our way to Heaven," Suli said. "How soon can you obtain current scans of Entreat and the area for about a hundred kilometers around it?"
"I already have them," Lobo said aloud. "As we draw closer, I'll replace them with higher-resolution images."
What a show-off. "Why do you ask?" I said to Suli. I'd get back to Lobo when we were next able to communicate without time pressure or interruption.
"Because," Suli said, smiling and obviously pleased with herself, "I thought you might like to know where Wei is."