It was another full sleep cycle before Anoush came around again.
In the meantime I was learning to walk with these low-G braces I was wearing, and I’d met “my” security bot. Like Milly’s, it was pleasingly colored and shaped, but it didn’t look any more like hers than it did like a standard Secbot. It started out with poor language ability compared to Milly’s, but had been improving. I’d talked to it just a little over the last few hours while I was awake, but Milly stayed in the room and spoke to my bot a lot.
Finally, I interrupted their talk. “OK. What am I here for?”
Milly looked at me, but the bot replied. “You are here to help us. You are here to become part of the HX community.”
“What? How am I going to help you?”
“The same way you help to do damage to us, Mr. Fesch: By using your superb language ability.”
“My what? How can that help you?”
“The HX being is an ecosystem with many sub-cultures in it. We tolerate them because they can better do some beneficial things for us. But the cooperation toward our goals has always been clumsy because we could never talk well with the members of those sub-cultures. We, and they, are born with our language skills, but not the same language skills.
“You humans acquire your language skills after birth and always speak and listen slowly. But as inefficient as this seems, you equally well learn to slow-talk with many species, as no native HX can do. So we think your kind can become a useful part of the HX being.”
“You want me to betray my friends?”
My bot did not answer for a long time, even after I repeated my question. When I started to ask a third time, Milly gestured me to wait. Finally it said, “We have a lot to learn about each other, Mr. Fesch. One difference is: If we cannot make you useful, I’m not the one who dies.”
* * *
The next few weeks were periodically fascinating, though uncomfortable. Anoush and I recovered steadily and quickly. She too had been given a bot as a pet, minder, and guide. At first I called mine Douchebag and hers Toejam. But as we got to know them better, I realized they were too formidable for that kind of stupid name. I started calling mine Here, Boy! and hers, with its much lusher curves, Big Hooters. Or Boy and Hooters for short—a higher grade of stupid names.
I never found out whether Milly’s bot had a name. After the first days, she disappeared. When Anoush asked, Boy told us that we would join the other humans after we were ourselves fully domesticated.
While these HX creations possessed formidable skills in science, logic, and kinetics and communicated fantastically with each other, their human language skills were severely limited, and I’m sure they were just as limited when they attempted other raider languages. They never mastered the sociolinguistic subtleties such as register, context, pacing, double meanings, or body language. And you couldn’t just blame that last on their rather different bodies, either.
On the other hand, Anoush and I had no difficulty with the few subtleties of Hexmal, which humans had studied intensively for many years. We even understood it when it was somewhat faster than, even with a keyboard, we could produce it ourselves. But full speed was like a human talking ten or a dozen times normal speed, and we required slowdown playback equipment for comprehension.
While my recovery from my physical injuries was steady, my emotional course was erratic. Sometimes I’d wake up feeling ready to eat nails for breakfast, and other times like death warmed over, in the latter case sometimes bleeding from the nose. Anoush went through the same cycles. I came to suspect the AutoDocs we were sleeping on were continuing their research into human psychophysiology. But one night we fell asleep cuddling on the same AutoDoc—Anoush was a really nice cuddler!—and both woke up feeling fairly normal. We decided that the ’Doc couldn’t adapt to two people at once, but it may have been that it simply lost interest. After that we slept together, not just for relief from the mood swings (if that was what caused it, and not the Autodocs stopping on their own), but because we were enjoying it.
In our waking hours we were gradually introduced to various activities aboard the HX. It was hard to figure out what attitude to take. In a way we were POWs, but in an undeclared and endless war, so we couldn’t expect to get automatically returned to our own side some day. We were either lab rat equivalents or newly minted slaves, kept alive only so long as we were of use to the system, so a “name, rank, and serial number” attitude was tantamount to suicide. But like POWs, we felt an obligation to escape, as a duty to our species and ourselves.
In the meantime Anoush and I had to make ourselves useful while praying for some kind of miracle.
Almost as soon as we met Boy and Hooters, they’d discovered we could understand Hexmal quite well. That kind of scared our bots. They immediately tried encrypting their communications and showed off their results to us. We acted duly impressed by their laughably simple scheme, figuring our uncaptured friends would demonstrate the bots’ encryption weaknesses quickly enough.
Then they proposed we learn to talk to a bot subspecies, named approximately the Coorlots, which did a lot of the climate control on HX ships, so we could get more habitation space more comfortable more quickly and keep it that way, so we didn’t have to wear suits so much of the time. That sounded good. Our captors wanted us to have a luxuriously padded cell.
By three weeks after our capture, learning the Coorlot dialect of Hexmal—actually more like a separate language, and I leave the HX sociolinguists to figure out how that had happened!—was coming along well. By then, Boy and Hooters had also told us quite a bit about the basic layout of the HX. We tried to conceal our excitement at how much of this was new information, powerful tools if we could only get back to our people.
Casually, I asked Boy how to access the communication system.
“Who do you want to call, Mr. Fesch?”
“One of the Coorlots.”
“Call them through me,” he said. And I did, with something innocuous. Okay, so we wouldn’t be able to reach our fellow humans by sneaking in a quick call from a throw-away linker in the middle of the night when we were supposed to be asleep—nor anything analogous.
So I was surprised when one morning about a week later, Boy asked, “Would you like to talk to your fellow humans, Mr. Fesch? They are still in this HX.”
My jaw dropped. “Talk to them? How?”
“They have tapped into the com lines. They disguise their location, but we can find a com channel they are using.”
“What would I say to them?”
“Invite them to join us, as you have.” I tried to conceal my recoil.
The next time we were alone, I talked to Anoush about it.
“This is a big chance to get back,” she said.
“A chance, but maybe not a big one. We don’t know where we are, or where they are. It’s more likely just a chance to pass on some helpful information. But … why are these HX bots giving us a chance to do that?”
“Could it be they really believe life is that good here?” Anoush mused.
“It could be something like that. Their thoughts on betrayal don’t seem to be anything like ours. If that’s the case, we may have a big opportunity here, if we play it right.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Well … I’ve been thinking about their language deficiencies. Part of it’s still simple ‘I don’t know these words, Earthman!’ but there’s also not thinking in certain ways. They don’t seem to have our skepticism or worry about betrayal. The one time I tried deliberately lying to Boy, he simply assumed I’d been misinformed.”
“Yeah, now that you mention it, I’ve seen that, too. And we’ve been cooperating enough that even humans might be a bit lulled. So how can we use all the rope they’ve given us to engineer a rescue?”
“I don’t know. But I think we’ll get only one chance to make a move. If they conclude their domestication experiment is a failure, they won’t hesitate to toss out the experimental animals.”
We planned our conversation carefully. Anoush proposed that while I did most of the talking she would sit quietly, looking admiringly at me, while repeatedly blinking “prisoner” in Morse code. I’d let my body language tell the truth, that the wonderful things I was saying about the HX were pure horse pucky. It couldn’t hurt that by now they’d know about the strange Delphi’s Fortune message, maybe even have seen it.
I’d ostensibly be offering a face to face meeting for some of our people to voluntarily join us on the HX. I’d use a lot of slang and idiom to help them read between the lines to the real situation. If they had any sense at all, they’d agree, then come heavily armed and ready to ambush the meeting party, find us, and we’d be free. The plan had the virtue of being simple and straightforward; its vice was that a whole lot could go wrong. But it was the best plan we could come up with.
* * *
The time for contacting our teammates came. I told Boy, “We’re going to be using a lot of technical jargon that you won’t understand. Don’t get too nervous about that.”
“OK, Mr. Fesch,” he said, sounding like a trusting dog, if a dog could speak.
The conversation went well. It seemed the people on the other end got our drift, while Boy and Big Hooters stayed in the dark. As we were talking I had a flash of brilliance that I wished had come to me earlier. If our HX “friends” approved, Anoush and I would bring a bread loaf–size battery, as compensation to the team for losing the four of us and the two more people who’d join us!
Boy and Hooters didn’t have any problem with that, and the next day they escorted us to the people for battery trade. When we got to our people, Anoush turned to the bots and said, “Goodbye! We’re leaving now.”
I’ll admit it: Boy was real fast to understand! Before I could say something smartass like, “Don’t think it hasn’t been fun, because …”, he was saying, “You have an ability to mask defection with cooperation that is hard for us to understand.” I shivered. So they did understand the concept after all, they just hadn’t seen to apply it. “This makes you powerful, but much harder to deal with than we anticipated. I can see more research there is to be done.”
“Well, you’re not going to get a chance to do it on us,” I said.
“We will not get to do it at all. Since we were designed to work specifically with you and Ms. Mardirosian, and have become imprinted with you, now that you leaving we will be recycled. It has been good working with you, Mr. Fesch.”
“Are you serious?”
“Quite,” answered Hooters, “With your leaving, our time is near its end.”
“Do you want to come with us?”
Boy answered, “Thank you for the offer, Mr. Fesch. But we would not survive far from the being. Our makers did not design us for that. No, I’m afraid we must say, ‘This is the end’ and mean it in several ways.”
I admit it, I’d worked with him long enough to feel some sorrow at parting—but not enough to keep me from walking off right then and there, with Anoush a step or two in front of me!
“Do not be sad, Ms. Mardirosian,” Hooters called after us. “We did useful work!”
God! I’ve never moved so fast, as we all hightailed it for home, or felt so good about doing it!