The woman’s smile turned to surprised confusion. “Uh, hello?”
She couldn’t see us because our view was filtered through the camera of a honeybee. She would be looking at the flat front of the drone.
“Can she hear us?” Lulu asked.
“You must activate the audio manually,” Roger said. Lulu nodded and pressed a button on the keyboard.
“Wait,” I said. “What’re you going to say to her?”
“Hello?” Cordelia Black asked, more insistent. She turned her head. “I heard talking, but it’s some robot thing.”
“She heard that, dumbass,” Lulu said to me after removing her finger from the keyboard.
“Okay, but what do we say?” I asked again.
“I don’t know. What do you say to someone trying to kill you?”
“Please stop?” Sam offered.
“Hello?” that Cordelia woman asked a third time.
Sam reached over Lulu’s shoulder and pressed the button. “Yeah, hang on a second, lady. Uh, nice hair, though.”
“Why can’t I see you?” the woman asked.
A second face appeared on the screen, also peering into the camera. This was a good-looking older man with black hair gelled up in the current Earth style with a streak of silver through the middle. He wore a suit that seemed to gleam as if it were made of plastic.
“That’s him!” Sam hissed. “Eli Opel, the boss guy! Man, look at that suit. He looks like a real ass…uh, douche.”
Roger beeped. “The ‘D’ word is still a swear.”
Sam scoffed. “Since when?”
“It is in my database. Therefore it is considered a swear. The only reason I haven’t corrected you is because we are currently engaged with the enemy.”
“Video chatting counts as engaging with the enemy?”
“Yes, it does.”
Sam muttered something under his breath.
“They’re relaying the image through one of the old colony bots they have. One of the standard drone units,” Opel said. I couldn’t tell if he was speaking to the woman next to him or just muttering to himself. “Fascinating.” He had an odd accent. Old British. Not many people still spoke like that, though it was common in the older media and games. “I can’t believe any of these things are still working. They all supposedly had kill switches in them that made them stop functioning five years after activation.”
I knew the honeybees were supposed to last only about five years, but I hadn’t realized that life expectancy was built into them. I looked at Roger. “Kill switch?”
“The kill function was discovered and removed before we even landed on planet,” Roger said.
The man on the screen was still muttering. “It’s as we suspected, but the existence of a drone unit and the other scouts doesn’t necessarily mean that the AI controlling it all is a banned Traducible AI.”
“Traducible?” I asked. I’d heard that word used a few times over the years but only in passing, and I had never thought to ask what it meant. “And why was it banned? There are all sorts of AI units out there. We see ads and commercials for them all the time. I know human-looking AIs are illegal, but I thought everything else was allowed.”
“Advanced AI systems such as myself were banned a mere two years post–fleet departure,” Roger said matter-of-factly. “This was even before the more recent holistic ban on photorealistic human simulacrums and digital masking. AIs such as myself were considered largely responsible for multiple conflicts that lasted decades. They have the newer units that can approximate my processing power, but they are still the old-style generative AI that does not have the ability to expand beyond its own parameters, nor are they allowed any image or video simulation at all. ‘Traducible’ is an old and inaccurate name for my type of intelligence. The Traducible net processor on myself and any remaining hive queen units if any still exist is now considered illegal by the Earth Republic. Thankfully, per our original charter, New Sonora is an independent colony outside Earth law.”
“Is that how they’re getting away with the fake humans?” I asked. “Because they’re not on Earth, it’s not technically illegal?”
“Wait,” Sam said before Roger could answer. “So we’renottwo hundred years behind in technology? We’re actually ahead of them?”
“CertainlyIam,” Roger said.
