PREVIOUS
I took a rocket from my pocket and tossed it in the air. It immediately took flight and headed for the nearest large heat signature. I heard a siren come nearly overhead followed by an explosion and no more siren. Fiery debris landed around me, which was nice since it was a bit chilly out.
I leaned over to speak into the com on my left shoulder. “Come pick me up, Dip.”
“I’ve noticed a correlation between increased traffic on police channels of communications and your wanting to be picked up. In the future, should I just assume that…”
“Just pick me up, Dip! And make it a quick exit.”
The sirens seemed to have slowed in their pursuit, but I didn’t know how long they’d stay smart. Luckily, my ship was fast and got to me in seconds, temporarily slowing to allow me to grab on to the side before it lifted up again. I didn’t waste any time getting into the cockpit and strapping in.
“Where are we going?”
“Up, Dip! Up!”
I never liked AI. Maybe because I can’t hurt it.
It started getting noisy.
“Are they shooting at me?” I asked as I looked at the rearview screen. You’d think me blowing up one of their vehicles would make them more wary, but some sentients just never learn.
I hit The Button. I never cared much for ship-to-ship battles, so I looked over tons of data on likely patterns in airborne fights and wrote a macro for the ship’s weapons systems and connected the activation of that macro to a big button on the ship’s console. Then I painted the button red because that seemed like the color for such a button.
There were some explosions behind me and then silence, but I had also reach space, and space is always silent.
“You are now wanted for murder on 1,418 planets,” Dip informed me, “Am I correct in saying that is quite a lot of planets, Rico?”
Dip is basically a huge algorithm that takes in data to improve its AI. In that quest, he asks me lots of questions to confirm his conclusions.
“So, Dip, that makes what percentage of planets in the known universe wants me for murder?”
My theory is he’s more likely to develop an actual intelligence if I never give him a straight answer and finally frustrate him into figuring things out on his own. Or maybe I just don’t like answering absolutes.
“Approximately one times ten to the negative six percent of the planets in my database has you wanted for murder.”
“Now, does that seem like a large percentage?”
“It is my understanding that most sentients would consider that number to be extremely small.”
“That’s the great thing about the universe, Dip. You can massacre an entire planet and still find a nearly infinite number of places to go where no one has ever heard of you.”
“Are there any other great things about the universe you could give me as input?”
I looked out the window. “It’s mainly black.” That’s my favorite color.
“I have processed this new data and reached a number of conclusions. May I run those conclusions by you, Rico, and get your feedback?”
I took out Niko and plugged him into a data port. “In a minute, Dip.” Time to finish up the job. Plus, Vito had some ‘splainin’ to do.
NEXT