Sleeping Janine

By M.E. Owen

A docked cargo ship run by an autonomous, non-sentient AI refuses admittance and instead threatens an attack against Zion's neural net.

 

Police Chief Pilar Jones y Garcia, Far Trails' navigator/muscle Cray Solnik, and tech goddess Selma Zarvos, along with a cloned copy of Max—Zion's rogue AI—must find a way aboard, stop the shipboard AI, and figure out what the seventeen thousand not-quite-human life signatures in the holds are.

 

They discover that the stakes for Zion Station and beyond are life and death, and for Jones, a personal revelation that will change her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.E. Owen
• Release date: Aug 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201882358

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Sleeping Janine

SLEEPING JANINE

ZION STATION 07

M.E. OWEN

TOWHEE PUBLISHING

SLEEPING JANINE

A ZION STATION STORY

Twenty-three months after the AI Purge

The X2 was not the largest ship docked at Zion Station, or the newest, or even close to the most interesting. It was just a freighter.

But I noticed it anyway. Came with my job as Zion Station’s Police Chief, an almost unconscious mental tracking of who was docked, who was expected, who’d just left and what their stated business was. And in some cases, their real business.

So I took note of the X2, but only in passing. If its captain or crew caused problems, I’d take a bigger notice. In the meantime, I had other ships and problems to worry about, specifically, other ships’ drunken shore-leaving crews. Lots of them.

Which is why it was Max, our resident rogue AI, who figured out that there was something very odd about the X2.

I was having a well-deserved beer—just one, mind, because even though I was technically off duty, I was never really off-duty—sitting in a large booth at the back of Noiz, Zion’s well-hidden, unmarked, station-personnel-only bar.

With me were Skip, Jana and Cray, captain and crew of the Far Trails; Selma Zarvos, tech goddess, recently from Earth; and fellow Zionites Dane Peterson and Mike Stevens, dockmaster and techmaster respectively. All friends.

Like me, Dane was limiting his intake, because like me, he was never really off duty. Mike, on the other hand, was apparently trying to impress Selma by to keeping up with Far Trails folks. Bad idea, for so many reasons, not the least was that apparently she didn’t drink. Silly woman.

Thirty-one ships docked at once, Dane said in his deep voice. Hasn’t been that many since, well, a long damn time.

Zion has been around awhile. These days, we provided cargo transfer, supply rendezvous, and yes, shore leave. Nineteen of those docked ships were gas-miners, and their rambunctious crews had kept my deputies and me hopping for three days straight. But the two largest and most obnoxious of the gas-miners, the Ignatius and the Galtus Glory, had left this morning, taking with them their bitter rivalry and the vast majority of potential arrestable offenses. My deputies had each gotten a few hours off, and now it was my turn for a bit of downtime, even if it was close to two in the morning.

The bar was quiet, with only one other group here, a hard-core trio of shop owners from the entertainment deck, heads together at a table near the door.

Selma was saying something when Max’s voice came softly into my earjack. Jones,

I pulled my personal comm from its protective sheath on the sleeve of my station coverall, keyed the communication to speak to Max, and typed, Hi Max, how’s the new digs holding up?

One of the things TechGoddess Selma had done was set up, secure, and hide a second neural network, specifically for Max.

The original neural net had been built by the Consortium, which thought Max was dead. If they discovered otherwise, they’d come out in force and make damn sure he stayed dead this time, and his friends with him. Thus the subterfuge.

I hated subterfuge. Cracking heads was more my style, but in this case I heartily approved.

Max had barely escaped the Consortium’s AI genocide by fleeing into Zion’s outdated mainframe, which was only still online because Zion itself was equally outdated. Where, of course outdated meant decrepit, which translated to mostly beneath the Consortium’s notice, which was just fine with us.

Three weeks ago, Max had moved into his new digs, declared it 3.4 orders of magnitude superior to his old digs in Zion’s mainframe, and 0.4 orders of magnitude worse than his original neural network home.

We are still working out the bugs, he said. "Net2 is now 3.78 orders of magnitude better than the mainframe. I especially appreciate not having to drag my friends into the icky