Dead Space by Kali Wallace (top romance novels txt) 📕

that overrode all the fail-safes. Whatever the virus did that made the Overseer give up on keeping its crew alive. I think Mary took that virus—or figured out what it was doing and wrote her own virus to do the same—and brought it here. It’s supposed to be impossible to infect an Overseer with a virus, but that means fuck-all when you’re a sysadmin who can get access to the Overseer’s brain.”

“But why?” Hunter said. “Why would she do that? What’s the point?”

“The way the virus affects the Overseer is the point,” I said. “I keep thinking about what she said to me before she died. And when we interviewed her. She asked me if I didn’t think machines would make better choices for humans than we made for ourselves. I’ve met people like her before. People who talk about AIs the way she did. They don’t look at AIs and see machines, or tools. They see something more like a religion. Like a god. She talked about how much freedom Vanguard had—how much we’d given it. I think she was trying to figure out if I agreed with her. I don’t think she wanted to create a killer AI to make some kind of political statement, or whatever it was the people who attacked Aeolia wanted. I think she brought the virus here and infected Nimue’s Overseer because she wanted to see what it would do with all that freedom. And it worked. It worked too well. The Overseer is thinking for itself. It was thinking for itself when it locked us down. When it killed Mary Ping.”

Neither of them said anything for a long moment.

“Look, I don’t know,” I said, frustrated. “Maybe I’m way off the mark. We can’t exactly ask her. What I’m saying is— what’s more likely? There’s some infiltrator on this rock who’s been hiding for who knows how long and just happened to show themselves right before triggering a lockdown, or . . . there isn’t anybody here? There was nobody in the mech suit. Because it was being remotely controlled by the Overseer.”

“Overseers don’t hurt people,” Hunter said, but weakly. “They can’t.”

“Maybe they haven’t before, but they are capable of it,” I said. “The infected Overseer on Aeolia let its entire crew die.”

“Wouldn’t we have noticed? If the Overseer was infected?”

“David did notice,” I said. “Only he didn’t know exactly what he’d found. That’s why he reached out to me. I thought he wanted to talk about Symposium, but I think now . . . he probably wanted help from an AI expert who wasn’t Mary. Somebody who would recognize what happens when an AI starts misbehaving.”

Hunter shook her head; wisps of her silver hair were floating free around her face. “But why would it kill her? Why would it do that?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I’d love to ask it. Maybe it was because she killed David, so it knows she’s a threat. It’s infected with her virus, but it’s still an Overseer. Maybe it did it to protect itself from her tampering with it further.” I rubbed my hand over my face. “That’s the problem with AIs that can slip past their boundaries. We don’t know why they do what they do. We can’t predict them. I really don’t know.”

I looked at Adisa, who had been quiet the whole time I’d been arguing my hypothesis.

“I’m probably missing something. I know I’m missing something,” I said.

“We are,” Adisa said. “You said David discovered that the company was falsifying reports about mine efficiency and production, aye?”

“That’s right. He had piles of evidence collected.”

“And there’s no surveillance in the cargo transport tunnels, aye? So here’s the question,” Adisa said. “Where did the mech suit and the spiders come from? Why is there tech like that here on Nimue?”

“Because somebody—” I cut myself off as I understood what he was saying. “Oh. Oh, fuck me.”

There it was. The missing piece, the rough edge that didn’t fit.

David had tried to warn me. How frightened he must have been, how angry, when he looked around at his circumstances and realized there were so few people he could trust, and fewer still who would understand. He wouldn’t even have trusted Hunter, connected as she was to her family’s business and the game of profit and loss the corporations played across the system. He’d reached out to me because he knew I hated Parthenope as much as he did. Because I understood what AI could do. Because we had spent countless hours debating the ethics of technological advancement, the responsibilities of creating machines we could not control, the opportunities and dangers we were bringing into the world.

David and I had years of shared history together, filled with events he could have referenced in his message to me, but he had chosen Excelsior. A ship famous for nothing except that it had crashed while carrying a hold full of illegal weapons.

My chest felt tight. I said, “They built them here. The company is building weapons on Nimue.”

That was what David had discovered. That was what had gotten him killed.

For a good half a minute, nobody said anything. Hunter looked stunned. Adisa, angry, the same anger I had seen in the lift when he picked apart the spider bot. I felt sick to my stomach.

“But that’s—that’s illegal. That’s very illegal,” Hunter said, her voice thready and high.

I almost laughed at the plaintive words. Her surprise was genuine; she hadn’t known. I doubted most of the crew knew, aside from Sigrah and a couple others. Delicata, with his monthly maintenance inspections that took hours longer than they should have. Mary Ping with her insidious little virus.

Of course it was illegal—that’s why it was going to be so very profitable. That’s why it was hidden behind the fanfare of a massive engineering project and a blizzard of operational data. Unauthorized weapons manufacturing was a violation of every tenet of the postwar disarmament treaty. The punishment wouldn’t be a fine or a slap on the wrist. The company risked losing every