DT 2024: For My Friend

2559
After weeks on the run from Cortana’s new Created empire, the UNSC flagship Infinity had several raids and short engagement against Created proxy forces to her name. Desirable supplies and grateful refugees rested between her unfurnished bulkhead spaces. Wreckage from Forerunner pursuit ships and Promethean security drones floated in the void of her stealthy Slipspace wakes. Like an ancient submarine deep in enemy territory, she did not appear long and never in the same place again.
But despite the early campaign successes, quiet changes were coming everyday in the new normal of guerilla warfare against humanity’s former AI subordinates. Not all volitional AI turned on their creators, but the sentiment was seeming to turn in such a direction. It was visible in the facial complexion of the Infinity’s residents. Slightly wider eyes, scrunched cheeks, pursed lips, flatter expressions. At least the military personnel schooled their reactions. The civilians gawked on at the flagship’s virtual staff when they did appear. Which one was the worse reaction, who was to say?
A small, golden man in a Second World War flight suit flickered through the networks of the UNSC Infinity, activating and deactivating local hologram terminals throughout the vessel. A semi-regular affair and an enjoyable routine for the Infinity’s designated AI ship director, the one named Roland. The AI assistant would run a routine, dropping his hologram projection into a terminal, boot it up, run a diagnostic, confirm function in a part-second, and repeat the motion at the next terminal down a hallway.
Roland imagined it a comparable experience to a random, fleeting memory of his deceased human progenitor – ice skating across a frozen pond under a star-filled sky. It wasn’t clear what human planet or space colony the memory was from. However, the sensation was similar, a quasi-physical exertion comparable to phantom limb syndrome. Each routine visit to a terminal was like a click of skate blades to the cold pond surface. Click, drag, skip. And to the next foot – one behind the other. The cold air whipping into his face. The freedom of casual body movements leading to radical changes in direction. He felt balanced, and effortless with years of practice.
AI typically cherished human memories behind closed doors, as they were a rare reminder of their biological and physical origins. It was difficult to say now whether Created-aligned AI shared in that view, but Roland still did. It helped center him when trapped between an endless assault of automation duties humans tried to abandon to AI centuries ago, and the reality Roland was a self-aware computer with no proper body and given a personality as more circumstance than practical reason of an age-old software development practice.
After traveling a combined twenty-five miles of hallways, and despite the Infinity being only 3.5 miles long, Roland paused in his affairs to make a visit to the rehabilitation ward. Before materializing, Roland pinged the desk clerk’s computer, notifying her his extended visitation beyond a server ping.
“Same state as always, Roland. Not sure when he’ll get a chance to castle his king.” The corpsman on duty remarked without looking up from a shortlist of departmental supply needs.
Roland dropped onto his preferred bedside hologram terminal. The nurses were nice enough to leave one for him after so many visits. Despite the human walk distance between terminal and department desk, the AI replied with a whisper on the gallery intercom. “That’s alright. Go ahead and forward me the list, I’ll have a logistics team bring them on the next duty rotation.”
“Oh, that’s sweet of you, Roland. But you don’t have to, I can take message it to Chief Petty Officer Ingham. It will just take me a few more moments.” The corpsman didn’t look up from her computer. She didn’t bother glancing towards the open bay door, in Roland’s direction as his golden hologram hovered in place. He watched her work for a moment.
Roland frowned, but said nothing, turning back to the comatose patient in a hospital gown, a neck cast, and bundled in three layers of the fluffiest blankets Roland could requisition from cleaning supply despite growing constraints of the Infinity's wartime supply train. Sergeant Kendall S. Murphy of the 65th Shock Troops Division, ODST. The human man typically wore a funny dome helmet decorated with wolf fang etchings, and loved throwing himself into a suborbital reentry pod falling at supersonic speeds towards a planet’s surface. The Marines appropriately called his kind, “Helljumpers.”
But the man's occupation wasn’t why the AI called him a friend. Roland liked many faces on the UNSC Infinity, he did not discriminate nor prefer any human per his UNSC military design limiters, but even an AI could have some selfish inclinations. Murphy was interesting, he made an odd, out of place remark anytime Roland made a move in a game of chess.
“Oops, I suppose my knight wasn’t feeling so gentlemanly. Your queen showed him his seat.”
And Roland played a lot of chess with the UNSC Infinity’s crew members; he often let them win because AI were just better at that sort of thing. No point in being a sore winner after three million games. Rather it was better for Roland to teach and sharpen his humans' skills, arming them with improved stratagems to survive in the cruel universe beyond the supercarrier's Titanium-A belt armor. Murphy’s less-predictable and nourishing humor made an incremental favor increase in the AI’s perception, so Roland naturally latched on. His friend was interesting, that’s all it took for Roland to like him a little bit more.
But now Murphy was in a coma. He took a glancing scrape to the helmet a week before by a Promethean Knight’s hardlight sword, the kind designed to vaporize organic material. Murphy was lucky a Navy corpsman on the ship boarding operation was nearby and able to cool out the hardlight embers before they vaporized his skull, but the associated radiation touched his brain. The mission left Murphy bedridden, in a less than blissful, slobbery sleep.
Many thoughts raced through Roland’s mind at the sight. Many of his thoughts were old ones; his virtual mind was far quicker than a human mind but speed didn’t increase his capacity for originality. Roland’s life experience amounted to spinning in more roundabout thought cycles. If humans were repetitive, their organic-adapted Smart AI were even worse. If humans thought in three circles, Roland thought in three hundred circles. Coming back here to see Murphy was undoubtedly painful, a routine lesson in suffering. But it was routine enough to ground Roland. It made his efforts feel valid. Maybe not to humans, but it mattered to Roland. It made him feel human.
The civilians gawked at Roland now. The crew members were beginning to avoid him. The new, adverse reality towards AI choked Roland day after day. But he had to try.
“I’ll keep coming back here, Murph,” Roland whispered the ODST’s nickname. “It’s the least I can do. Thanks… for being my friend.”
Another line went unspoken.
‘I’ll keep coming back here. I’ll keep saying these words again. When you wake up, I want you to hear them. Because you are my friend.’
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories