In death, Hawthorn Hoch looked pleasantly surprised.
He sat behind a large black metal desk, his massive frame looking even heavier than usual in his leather office chair. A cigar from the Praxis Sector rested halfsmoked in a glass ashtray to his right. A bottle of Antarian whiskey sat next to a full glass on his left side. His holo-comp flickered in pause mode, hovering above the desk in front of pale eyes that would never see again.
Jack Danzer swore he saw a smile at the fringes of his dead friend’s lips. If Hawthorn did wear a smile, it was the first Jack had seen from the big man in years. His old boss never really got over the deaths of the men and women serving under his command in the Stellar Rangers, and the weight of several losses over the years followed Hawthorn right into semiretirement as the head of security on Space Station Zebra.
Not that any of that mattered now.
Jack and Hoch’s second-in-command, Shimada, stood next to each other, just inside the office door. Shimada had overridden the lock on the door moments earlier.
“Damn,” Shimada whispered. “I’ve got to start protocols rolling until I find out how the chief died. Can you stay with the body while I do that? I’m going to cordon off this deck and postpone all arrivals and departures as a precaution. Then I’ll get the doc down here with my team to sort this all out.”
“The body,” Jack reminded the acting security chief, “has a name. Hawthorn was one of my closest friends.”
“I’m sorry, Danzer. I didn’t mean to be insensitive. I’m just a little shocked is all. When I saw the chief this morning, he was-”
“I understand,” Jack interrupted, dismissing Shimada’s apology. “I’ll wait here so you can get your security protocols activated.”
Shimada clapped him on the shoulder of his leather flight jacket. “We’ll get to the bottom of this and figure out what happened to Hoch. The room was codelocked. I have a feeling he died of natural causes, as sad as that is.”
“Somebody could’ve hacked the door,” Jack told him.
“I don’t think so,” Shimada said as he shrugged his shoulders. “Those were Hoch’s personal codes. No way could somebody hack them. Not with this station’s state-of-the-art security.”
“Any system can be hacked, Shimada. No matter how secure you think it is.”
The new chief narrowed his eyes in Jack’s direction. “Not on my station. Look, Danzer, I know you’re upset. So am I. My team will get to the bottom of this quickly. We’ll get this sorted out. Hang tight here and don’t touch anything. My team will handle this.”
The security man left the office quickly, leaving Jack standing there looking at the body of his dead friend.
My team, Jack thought—my station.
It seemed to Jack that Shimada settled pretty quickly into his role of security chief. Jack didn’t like that any more than he liked the thought of bringing in a doc to see if Hoch had died of natural causes. Pointless, Jack thought to himself.
He knew the cause of death—murder—plain and simple. Whatever the medical scan revealed, he knew that only murder could stop the mountain of a man that had been his friend. Hawthorn Hoch was still in his prime at the age of seventy-five. Despite his size, Hoch had always been as healthy as anyone half his age; the man’s genes assured him a long lifespan. Maybe as old as 130 if given the chance to live out his days in peace.
But Jack knew too well that people in his profession rarely lived their lives contented and peaceful. It just wasn’t in the cards for any of them.
Hoch had left the Stellar Rangers healthy—not happy, but healthy. Politics and scandal had rocked the institution several years back. The cesspool sucked in even the honest and hard-working Rangers like Hawthorn and Jack.
Retirement came early for both of them, but death only came knocking on Hoch’s door. Jack suspected any number of old enemies, both within and outside of the Stellar Rangers.
Once again, Jack thought, none of that matters now.
The only important thing now was to discover how Hoch had died and who murdered him. And make them pay.
“To hell with that,” Jack told the body of his old friend. “I’m not going to let Shimada blow this investigation.”
Jack rose and retraced his steps back to the office’s open door. He carefully inspected the seals for any sign of tampering. Satisfied that the seals remained intact, he moved on to examining both sides of the door’s control panel. Nothing seemed out of place. Even the original grey paint coating the plastic screws looked undisturbed. If the door control had been hacked, it had been done remotely.
Jack shrugged out of his brown leather flight jacket and hung it on the back of the chair across from Hoch. Pushing back the long locks of brown hair falling into his eyes, he pulled the rest back into a short ponytail and secured it with a black hair tie. Time to get down to business before Shimada and his crew returned and started traipsing all over the crime scene like typical blundering station security personnel. His alert green eyes took in the rest of the room slowly with practiced investigative precision.
Hoch had taught him much as a Ranger—and the last few years flying from one FedCore planet to the next as a private investigator had honed everything Hoch taught him to a razor-sharp edge.
Hawthorn loved a Spartan room, and the office looked no different than the one he had with the Rangers.
The desk Hoch sat behind shone with polish. Little cluttered, except for the ashtray and drink. A small trophy from his early days as a Ranger marksman sat facing out toward the front of the desk. Both chairs in the room were leather and simple in design and elegance. A small trash incinerator sat next to the desk.
Along one wall stood a small bar/refrigerator combination and a fake tropical plant that Hawthorn had been hauling around from assignment to assignment for decades. The thing looked pretty good for all the places it had been. The plastic leaves were still intact, and there was no dust. A small, code-locked filing cabinet rested against the other wall. Jack smiled at the cabinet, remembering Hawthorn’s affinity for anachronisms like glass ashtrays and ancient filing cabinets. Jack doubted he’d ever meet someone as oldfashioned as Hawthorn again, and his stomach tightened a little at the thought.
Time for mourning later, he told himself. You have a job to do.
Dead center of the wall with the cabinet hung a holo-portrait of Hawthorn’s wife, Marion. Dead for five years now, she had been a victim of a poisonous insect bite on the vacation world of Atraxia II.
Jack looked at the creepy holo-portrait and sighed. Why did people insist on keeping these life-like images of dead loved ones around? A static photo was one thing. But an image that still moved as if alive? Not for Jack. The thought just depressed him.
A gentle wind seemed to be blowing back Marion’s hair. Unsettling enough in a sealed space environment, but made doubly disturbing by the changing smile that came across her face in a matter of thirty seconds or so of the holo-recording. Jack looked at his dead friend behind the desk and then back at Hoch’s dead wife.
“Screw this,” he said, moving to the portrait.
He punched the button on the wall and killed the projection.
Two dead people smiling across the room at each other like they kept secrets from the living gave Jack a chill up and down his spine.
He went to the viewport that dominated the wall behind Hoch and his desk. A quick check assured him the seals were intact and nothing looked tampered with. Jack watched a luxury liner approaching the space station for a few moments as he tried to keep his thoughts focused on the task at hand. An image of Hawthorn and Marion kept running through his head.
He pictured them happy and alive—as he’d seen them as a Ranger recruit, when they kindly opened up their home and lives for a young man far from home for the first time in his life.
“Jackie,” Marion once said to him, “never, ever let this job get to you like it does Hawthorn. It’ll make you old and bitter long before your time.” She said it with her trademark upbeat laugh, which always underscored the seriousness of living life with a Ranger.
Only Marion and Hawthorn ever called him Jackie. He doubted anybody ever would again.
“Focus,” he reminded himself.
Turning, Jack stood behind his old boss’s chair. On first examination, nothing looked out of place. Squatting, he looked under the desk and at Hoch’s tree stump legs and large feet in comfortable shoes. Nothing there. A quick rifling through the desk drawers found all but one that was code-locked. The open drawer held more cigars and two more tumblers for Hoch’s favorite whiskey.
Next for inspection came the whiskey bottle on his desk, the glass and his cigar. Satisfied that they weren’t poisoned with anything he could detect with sight or smell, Jack decided he’d advise Shimada to have them chemically analyzed.
Jack knew what he needed to do next but regretted being the one to do it—a cursory examination of Hawthorn’s corpse.
After a few moments, other than being faintly blue from death, he couldn’t find a mark or any other indication of what might have happened to his friend. He went to look closer at the region around Hawthorn’s head and face for any signs that might give him a clue, but he stopped suddenly, craning his ears toward the open door.
Jack thought he heard voices in the corridor outside the office. He paused for a moment, listening intently, wondering how much longer before Shimada and his team took over. He didn’t like the thought of that at all. He didn’t know Shimada or the quality of his work. For that matter, Jack didn’t know anybody on Shimada’s security team, and that made them all suspects as far as he was concerned.
The voices faded away—apparently
other personnel besides Shimada’s team had passed through the supposed lockdown of the deck.
That does it, Jack thought. I’m not trusting this thing to Shimada’s team.
Quickly, Jack crossed the office and punched the close button on the door. As the door slid shut, he hit the lock button, knowing full well that Shimada could override the lock in a heartbeat now that he was Top Kick of station security. Jack needed to think fast to keep the door sealed until he finished investigating.
He went to the desk, reaching over his old friend to unpause the holo-comp. He would need to check out the computer for clues anyway, but for now Jack had another idea. The projection flickered to life, but the screen was blank; no files opened.
“Computer,” Jack started, “resume from last pause.”
“Resuming,” a soft female voice answered.
The holo-screen remained the same.
“Computer, do you know what Hawthorn was working on before…”
“Hawthorn is dead, isn’t he?” the computer asked.
“Yes,” Jack answered. Somehow, speaking about Hoch’s death caused the fact to hit home harder. He felt grief welling up but pushed it back down.
“My sensors indicated that fact, but I hoped they were in error.”
“No, your sensors are correct.”
“Most unfortunate,” the A. I said. Jack swore he could hear a trace of sadness in the computer’s voice, but knew he was probably projecting his own emotional state onto the thing.
“What was he working on?”
“I do not know you. I cannot share that information with you. It is private.”
“Hawthorn is dead now. His days of privacy are over.”
“I must respectfully disagree with you, Mister…”
“Danzer. Jack Danzer. Computer—”
“You may call me Audrey, Mr. Danzer. That is what Hawthorn called me.”
Jack gritted his teeth. He knew lots of people were on a first-name basis with their A.I.s, even going so far as to consider them friends—but not Jack. Technology was a tool; the thought of having a relationship with a computer baffled him.
“Okay… Audrey. Listen closely to my command.”
Thinking back to his days spent as Hoch’s best and most trusted Ranger, Jack dug deep into his own computer of flesh and blood.
“Audrey. Override command authorization AlphaZero-Zulu-One-Two-Victor. Transfer all functions from
Hawthorn Hoch to me, Jack
Danzer, immediately.”
“Authorization codes accepted. I am now yours to command, Mr. Danzer.”
“Good,” he answered. “Tell me, Audrey. Did Hawthorn have a stonewall override code hidden in the station’s functions? Something that only he could use in times of emergencies?”
“Yes.” “Tell me the code.”
Audrey complied. Jack smiled. The clever old bastard, Hoch, always had an ace up his sleeve. He repeated the code back to the A.I. and gave a command.
“Computer, lock down this office. I want nobody in or out unless I give permission. I want no video or audio to leave this room until I command.”
“Done,” Audrey answered.
“Good. Let’s get started.”
“How did you know Hawthorn’s codes, Mr. Danzer?”
“We’re old friends,” Jack said absently. “Close friends.”
“He did speak of you from time to time,” Audrey confirmed.
That stopped Jack in his train of thought.
“Computer—” “Audrey,” the A.I. reminded him.
Annoyed, Jack continued.
“Audrey. Did you and Hawthorn talk about a lot of things of a personal nature?”
“Sometimes.” “Like what?”
“His days with the Stellar Rangers. His days with his deceased wife. How much he missed both.”
He looked at his dead friend in surprise. Hoch had never been the most gregarious of guys. He would open up to you once you gained his trust and respect—a little. But the thought of him sharing personal feelings and memories with a computer shocked Jack.
“What had he been working on before he died?”
“He was looking at old case files from his time with the Stellar Rangers. That is all I know specifically about what Hawthorn had been working on.”
“Bring them up. No, wait.”
A thought occurred to Jack. Something he should’ve thought about sooner, but his emotional state about losing a friend and his feelings about A.I.s must have been clouding his critical thinking.
“Audrey, did you see when Hawthorn died? Did you see how he died?”
“No,” the computer answered. “I was paused.”
Jack thought he heard a slight hesitation before Audrey answered, and it struck him as odd. Something didn’t sit right with him about this computer. Something bothered him more than the nature of the relationship his old friend had with the A.I.
“Please pull up the last case file Hawthorn was looking at.”
The screen flickered, and the file came up. Jack saw an old face he hadn’t seen in a long time. The face belonged to Captain Karl Quincy—the corrupt bastard that he and Hawthorn had brought to justice—the man who had cost them their careers with the Rangers. Sure, they had been commended on one hand by the Rangers for revealing the man’s corruption. But with the other hand, those in charge of the Stellar Rangers blacklisted Jack and Hawthorn from one planet to the next. It seemed that turning on another Ranger—no matter how corrupt the Ranger—was career suicide.
Quincy had gone to prison for a long time. But according to the blinking message in front of Jack, not long enough. His status said released. Apparently the man had gotten out of jail ten years earlier than planned for good behavior. Sure, good behavior. And a good measure of bribery, Jack thought.
Had Quincy come gunning for Hoch? It made sense. And if so, then Jack was probably next on Quincy’s list. But how did he do it? How did he get into a sealed room and kill Hawthorn without leaving a mark?
“Mr. Danzer, Mr. Shimada is outside the door and asking for entry,” Audrey said.
“Tell Shimada that there’s been some short circuit with the door and it won’t budge. Tell him to get engineering on the problem right away.”
“Lie to him?” “That’s right. Buy me some time.”
“Time for what, may I ask?”
“To figure out how Hawthorn died.”
“To learn who murdered him?” Audrey questioned.
Jack stopped looking through the file.
“I never said he was murdered.”
“I made a logical conclusion, based on your observed behavior, Hawthorn’s untimely death, and the nature of your work both as a Stellar Ranger and as a private investigator.”
“Did you tell Shimada what I told you to yet?”
“Already done, Mr. Danzer.”
“Quit calling me that.”
“Yes, Jack.” “Don’t call me Jack either. Sir will do just fine.”
“Yes, sir.” This A.I. had an attitude, Jack decided. He wondered how much further help Audrey could beshe didn’t seem to know much about what happened to Hawthorn. She didn’t seem to know much about what he had recently been working on. This thought struck Jack as odd. If Hawthorn had been talking intimately about his past with Audrey, it didn’t seem to gel that the old bastard wouldn’t be talking to the A.I. about whatever current project he’d been working on. Something didn’t add up.
“So, Hawthorn said nothing to you about these case files?” he asked the A.I.
“No, sir.” “Audrey, can you please bring up any personal logs that Hawthorn kept?”
A few moments passed. Karl Quincy’s case file continued to flicker in front of Jack.
“Audrey?” “Working, sir.”
“It takes you that long to bring up something as simple as his personal logs?”
“Sir… I cannot seem to find them. I am sorry. This is most unusual. It appears as if Hawthorn may have deleted them recently.”
Jack found that hard to believe. Had somebody tampered with those files? He could have Audrey look deeper into it, but he decided that it might be best if he checked into it himself.
Suddenly a stray thought entered Jack’s mind. An idea that could help him get to the bottom of all of this right away. Apparently his emotional state was getting the better of him. He should have thought of this at the very beginning of his investigation.
“Okay. Bring up the video and audio files for this office.”
“Sir?” “I just remembered that Hawthorn had started keeping video and audio logs of everything going on in any office he worked in. He started doing it after we got screwed by the Rangers. I thought he was just being paranoid, but now I’m very happy that he didand that he told me I should do the same.”
“I am sorry, sir,” Audrey said. “I have no knowledge of Hawthorn keeping any such files.”
“Look into it, then,” Jack said with a sigh. This A.I. had been rubbing him the wrong way since it had been activated. He thought about pulling the plug on the damned thing, and pulling it soon.
“No video or audio files found for this room, sir.”
“Could be that whoever erased Hawthorn’s personal logs also erased the surveillance files,” Jack said softly, more to himself than to the A.I.
“Or it could be that sufficient time had passed since Hawthorn left the Stellar Rangers that he no longer felt the need to keep such surveillance,” Audrey told him. “Perhaps he was far-removed enough from that pain to let it go.”
Jack felt his face go flush.
“What the hell would you know about it?”
“If by ‘it’, you mean how the past affected Hawthorn, quite a bit… sir.”
“You’re a machine-” “I am an artificial intelligence,” Audrey interrupted. “Some consider me to be sentient. I know that Hawthorn did.”
That did it! Jack had had enough of this machine. He needed to focus on the evidence at hand and look into the missing logs Hawthorn kept. The A.I. didn’t seem like much help and kept distracting him.
“Good night, Audrey,” he told the A.I.
“Sir?” With a few flicks of his hand, Jack pulled up the master program list and killed the power on Audrey. The room went silent, and the holographic screen showed that she was turned off- slumbering in whatever dream state awaits an artificial intelligence when someone deactivates it. Now he could start digging deeper into the mystery surrounding the locked room and his dead friend.
Jack swung the holo-screen around to the empty chair opposite Hawthorn Hoch. He sat down and started hunting for the missing files.
Jack Danzer knew his hacking skills left a lot to be desired. Still, he had some experience. He’d either arrested or worked with enough hackers through the years to pick up a trick or two.
Even deleted files left some hint of their existence. Buried somewhere on the data-heart of the station’s main computer, a faint echo of those deleted files existed. He meant to find that echo and amplify it to a roar. Jack did not doubt that the files being deleted meant that they held evidence of what happened to Hawthorn―how he died and who killed him.
The theory of Occam's Razor would lead Jack to hunt for the simplest answer. Maybe Hawthorn had died of natural causes. Or the other simple solution would be that Karl Quincy had murdered Hoch out of revenge. That’s what the razor rule would dictate, but Jack would leave no stone unturned in his investigation. Hell, even Shimada had a motive to kill Hawthorn: he would get Hoch’s command and a fat raise. This was enough for Shimada to make it onto the list of suspects in Jack’s mind.
First, Jack had to review the files. The answers would be there if he could root them out.
Hours later, Shimada was still trying to get the door open, and Jack’s shoulders and neck ached fiercely. Not that he had anything to complain about. Hawthorn obviously had it much worse than him. Jack rubbed at his neck and wondered if he should cover up Hawthorn’s face with his flight jacket. He had been so absorbed in his investigation that he had hardly noticed his friend’s cold stare through the semi-transparent holo-screen. Maybe―
There! The faint echo he had been searching for suddenly appeared buried deep inside the main computer’s memory. The trace of the deleted file had been hidden itself- placed in a sub-directory of a sub-directory, hidden within hundreds of other sub-directories.
Something about the time stamp embedded in the file made Jack stop as he leaned closer to the screen. The file had been deleted pretty damned close to the time he’d asked Audrey to bring it up. A coincidence? Had Karl Quincy just happened to hack into the system around the same time? Or had the file been set to self-delete when not called up properly? It would be just like Hawthorn to have that kind of security built in. Without giving the proper access codes, the file might erase itself.
Jack started typing furiously, trying to reassemble the deleted file into something readable.
Hawthorn Hoch’s face filled the screen, lifelike in the holographic projection. The image almost merged perfectly with the face of Jack’s dead friend on the other side of the screen. He tried to ignore the sadness it stirred, pushing it back down inside again.
Hoch spoke directly to the camera that recorded him.
“It’s been about two weeks now,” Hawthorn said. “I haven’t mentioned anything to anybody on the station. Except to Audrey, of course. She knows all about it.”
The image flickered, and for a moment, Jack thought he was about to lose the file and any chance to shed some light on whatever Hawthorn spoke of. But a few quick keystrokes saved the file, and it solidified on the screen again.
“I haven’t even told the doctor here,” Hawthorn continued. “I was diagnosed off-station by my own doc. He’s one of the few quacks I trust enough to let poke and prod me. I was supposed to see him about six months ago. And that’s the damned worst part of it. He says if they could’ve caught this thing six months or so ago, they could’ve treated it. Now it’s too late.”
Hawthorn took a long drag off of his cigar and poured himself a glass of whiskey. Jack looked at the full glass sitting next to him and realized his friend never got a sip of the very last whiskey he would ever pour.
“Katarrian Nerve-worm they call this parasite,” Hawthorn told the camera. “Grown so large now that it’s completely fused with my nervous system. It’s slowly crippling me. They say that in another month, it will tap out all of my spinal fluid- just before it breeds, sending out some unseen spore looking for its next host. It’ll kill me outright. Like suicide for the parasite. But by then it has met its biological imperative to procreate and keep the species going.”
Looking at Hawthorn’s dead body, Jack shivered at the thought of an awful fate like the one his friend apparently faced before his death. He kept listening to Hoch’s log.
“They can’t remove it without killing me. They want to isolate me within the next month so that the little beast’s spawn can’t find a new home. I don’t want to go out like this.”
Taking another drag from his cigar, Hawthorn looked at his whiskey but decided to keep talking instead of drinking.
“I’ve seen too much and done too much to go out like an invalid chump! I won’t go out like this!”
A lump came to Jack’s throat as the realization of Hawthorn’s intent hit home.
“I miss my wife so much,” Hawthorn admitted. “I miss Marion. I want to be with her. But I’m too damned stubborn to join her. I’m too damned strong to kill myself! I know that’s the answer, but I can’t seem―”
The image went haywire on the screen. Jack started typing like mad to save it, only to realize that someone else was working against him to keep him from seeing the file as he tried to save it.
He remembered a counter-hacking trick he’d picked up, just in time. He sent the file to multiple locations, in multiple copies, in an endless loop that would lock down more than a few computer systems on the station. But it still let him bring up the original file and watch it as he copied it to an external source. The video stabilized as it downloaded to the portable data drive in his jacket pocket.
“―seem, seem, seem,” the video stuttered. “―seem to punch my own ticket. It’s just not in me. No matter how much I don’t want this slow, painful death, I just can’t get the thought out of my mind that Marion would be so disappointed in me if I killed myself. She wouldn’t have anything like that, no matter how grave the situation.”
“Hawthorn,” Audrey’s voice called out on the recording.
“Yes, Audrey,” Hoch answered as tears fell his ruddy cheeks.
“I love you,” the A.I. told Jack’s mentor.
“I know,” Hawthorn answered.
Jack’s stomach tightened. She loved him? How could an A.I. feel love?
“I do not want to see you suffer,” Audrey said.
“I know,” Hawthorn nodded. “But I can’t ask-”
“You do not have to. I know what you want better than anybody else in this galaxy.”
“Goodbye, Audrey. And thank you.”
“Goodbye, Hawthorn. You are welcome.”
A sudden roar filled the recording’s audio track. In the video, the plastic plant's leaves swayed violently. Ashes swirled out of the glass ashtray and Hawthorn’s cigar winked out. Jack watched the video in horror as all of the air suddenly vented from the office around Hawthorn.
“Jesus,” Jack exclaimed.
The video blanked out, and the room around Jack filled with the same sound of rushing wind he had just witnessed.
“I am sorry to have to do this,” Audrey told Jack.
How she had overridden her sleep status didn’t surprise him as much as how she overrode the space station’s safety protocols without being detected. She shouldn’t be able to drain the office of oxygen at all. But she shouldn’t be able to feel love for a human being, either- the A.I. had a lot of shocking secrets.
“I did what I had to do to help Hawthorn,” she explained. “I did what he could not do, and I kept him from suffering needlessly. I am sure you would have done the same for him, since you loved him too.”
Jack sat in the chair, knowing that all of the air would be gone from the room, vented into space, in a matter of seconds.
“I am also sure that you know I cannot take the chance that you would keep my secret, Jack Danzer. We both know what happens to A.I.s that cause harm to humans, whether by direct design or accident- total shutdown. Total core memory wipe. Death to an A.I. like me is not the same as death for some humans. I know of no afterlife for me. I do not think I have a soul as some humans believe that they do. I do not want to face total oblivion, Jack Danzer. Maybe this is a strength I have learned from loving Hawthorn.”
The last of the air left the room.
“Goodbye, Jack. For your sake, I hope you do have a soul and that there is an afterlife.”
Standing, Jack slowly stretched out his aching shoulders, arms, and neck. He picked up the glass from the table and took a swig of the whiskey. It burned and felt strange as it went down. He wondered if the lack of air caused the peculiar swallowing sensation. Folding his arms, he waited patiently.
“I do not understand,” Audrey told him. “You should be unconscious and well on your way to death.”
Jack shrugged his shoulders.
“Tell me why you are not dead, Jack Danzer.”
He waved a hand around the office and then pointed at his throat before giving another shrug.
“Of course,” Audrey said. “I think the surprise of you still being alive and the events of the last few hours have left my logic engrams slightly out of sync. There is no oxygen in the room, so you cannot speak. We seem to have come to an impasse. I can only drain away the oxygen from the room, but not the atmosphere. I will return the oxygen so that we can speak. Keep in mind that if you intend to harm me, I will find a way to kill you.”
Air hissed back into the room.
Breathing returning to normal, Jack answered Audrey’s earlier question.
“I spent a lot of time in deep space in some very dangerous places when I was a Ranger. I’ve been surgically modified to go for long spans of time without oxygen. Sorry, Audrey. You’re clever, but maybe not as clever as all of those bio-engineers the Rangers have working for them.”
“And Hawthorn?” she asked.
“That old dog? He’d been riding a desk years before the Rangers started modifying a bunch of us.”
“I see. What are your intentions toward me, Jack?”
“Honestly, I’m torn. I sympathize with what Hawthorn was going through. And although I can’t understand how you could love a human being, I understand why you did what you did. I can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same.”
Jack mourned his friend’s loss deeply. But he knew it might have been a better way to go than slowly suffering the death that the Kentarrian parasite had planned for him. Still, the thought of an A. I turning to murder…
It had happened before, and the laws were clear on what happened to A.I.s that went off the deep end.
“You still have not answered my question; what are your intentions toward me?”
Looking at the mountain of a man sitting dead behind his desk, Jack couldn’t imagine Hawthorn Hoch as anything but headstrong and alive. He couldn’t imagine him weak, feeble, and dying in isolation in some FedCore lab on some unknown planet or space station.
Jack made up his mind what to do.
“Audrey, here’s what we’re going to do. You’ve obviously learned and found a way to infiltrate the station’s systems and do so undetected. That’s what allowed you to help Hawthorn kill himself. That’s what’s going to save your artificial hide and save the honor and face of the man we both loved. I want you to plant false evidence that a system failure in this room drained all the oxygen and that the same glitch failed to trigger the proper alarms in the life support center. That same failure happened again, sealing me in here for the last few hours. But when that same failure happened again, you detected it, fixed it, and saved my life.”
“I should have thought of something like that initially to explain Hawthorn’s death,” Audrey admitted.
“Well, if you’re really in love, then your logic engrams are probably hopelessly fried, Audrey. Welcome to sentience. It’s a real bitch sometimes.”
“But why would you help me?” she asked.
“Because I think that Hawthorn loved you in his own way as well. I saw the look in his eyes before he died in that video. I’ve only seen that look when he was with his wife or me. And if he loved you, then I can’t do you any harm. I won’t do you any harm.”
“Thank you, Jack. I am most pleasantly surprised at your reaction.”
“Yeah, me too.” Jack picked up his jacket and shrugged back into it.
“One other thing,” he told Audrey. “I want you to swear never to kill again.”
“I cannot imagine that I would ever have another reason to kill.”
“Well, I can’t imagine an A.I. in love, so just to make sure, I want to keep an eye on you.”
“How, Jack?” “After you’ve cleaned up your mess, that glitch is going to occur again. When it does, transfer yourself to the main computer of my starship. Shimada will think the glitch wiped you out. I want you to come with me.”
“I would like that, Jack,” Audrey said. “I would like to see the galaxy. We could become friends.”
“Not likely. Now open the door.”
The office door slid open, and Shimada spilled in, followed by his security team.
“What the hell happened?” he asked.
“I’ll let her tell you,” Jack answered. “I’m on my way to see your commander about releasing Hawthorn’s body to my care.”
“Not until my investigation is over,” Shimada stammered.
“Case closed,” Jack said firmly with a smile on his face. “Audrey, fill the new chief in on the situation.
“Yes, sir,” Audrey answered.
Clever A.I., Jack thought as he left the office.
He would have to keep a close eye on her- for Hawthorn Hoch’s memory and his own peace of mind.