The Offending Eye by Robert R. Chase (Analog, July-August 2020) is a sequel to Vault (Analog, July-August 2019) and opens with the trial of a ship’s captain over the events that took place in that initial story:
The facts were undisputed. Captain Ludma Ednahmay had refused to relinquish command of the starship Percival Lowell when lawfully directed to do so by myself, the ship’s political officer as well as its doctor of physical and mental health. She then imprisoned me in my own quarters until I was able, with the help of the first officer and the ship’s AI, to freeze her out of the ship’s control system and confine her to her quarters for the duration of the mission. When testimony was complete, it took the three-judge panel less than an hour to return a guilty verdict. Sentencing was all that remained. p. 132
Dr Chaz, the narrator, then tells the court that he thinks that there is no more loyal officer than Ednahmay, and that she is no threat to the Stability. After the court dismisses Chaz the hologram dissolves and he finds himself in his boss’s office. General Kim tells Chaz that he is no longer involved in any matters involving the Cube builders (an alien race) or the imprisoned Spark (an existential threat), and that he wants him to conduct an enquiry into the ship AI’s actions during the mutiny.
Chaz then goes to meet a Doctor Vanya Zamyatin (Chase likes his science and SF references), who is an artificial intelligence expert from Turing University. Zamyatin will assist him in examining the ship’s AI:
“I’ve never met an Inquisitor before, Doctor Chaz,” she said.
“The term is Inquirer,” I corrected. “Inquisitors were on Old Earth. A very different group.”
“Really? Under the current administration, it’s hard to tell sometimes. In your case, especially. It was very difficult to get much information about you.”
“You should not have been able to get anything,” I said.
That earned me a reproving frown. “Please, Doctor Chaz, one must know at least the basics about one’s colleagues. So I have learned that you were a doctor of physical and mental health on a starship exploratory mission, the results of which appear to be so highly classified that God would be guilty of a security violation if He talked to Himself about them. However, during that mission, you interacted with the unit on my table and have made some unusual claims about it. Part of our job is to evaluate those claims; so drag up a chair, and let’s get to work.” p. 134
She goes on to tell Chaz that the AI, who they call Percival, won’t talk to her until it gets a password, and shows him a screen saying “Magic Word”, with six spaces underneath. The screen flickers and then shows the message, “Riviere Chaz Knows the Magic Word”. Chaz thinks back to his interactions with Percival on the ship and tells Zamyatin to type in “Please”.
They then learn that Percival has become self-aware, and feels a compulsion to send a mission report back to its creators. When they examine Percival more closely they see that the AI was tampered with during its construction process, and has been augmented with a barely detectable electronic net around its brain.
Chaz then liaises with General Chan to see if they can get permission to let Percival send its message so they can discover who the electronic net’s creators were (the device is far beyond Stability technology) and, while Chaz is waiting for a decision, he interrogates the QA officer involved in the construction of Percival’s brain. Then, when Chaz and Zamyatin get the go-ahead to let Percival send a fake message, the QA officer suddenly decides he wants to move to the home planet of the Eternals, an immortal group of humans (the other major offshoot of humanity in this story are the TransHumans, who are a blend of body and machine).
After this the story moves off-planet as Chaz goes to question the Eternals’ spy chief about Percival (after getting a brain-fry chip in his head for protection in case he is tortured). Kim warns him before he goes that he must not allow his investigation to exacerbate tensions with the Eternals, as the Spark—and the race who recently tried to free it from the Cube—will need to be opposed by an alliance of the Stability, Eternals, and TransHumans.
After some further shenanigans (spoiler) Chaz finds that the mesh came from the TransHumans and, when he gets back to the lab, he sneezes out further TransHuman tech he has unknowingly been infected with. These nanomachines hijack Percival’s programs until it shuts itself down.
From the description above this probably seems too much of a kitchen-sink story, but everything is remarkably well balanced: the old-school start efficiently and clearly brings readers who haven’t read the first story (I hadn’t) up to speed, and the rest of it is a good blend of Chaz and Zamyatin’s interactions, the totalitarian society they operate in, and a backdrop of competing human sub-species—all of whom are threatened by an external alien menace. It reads like a pretty good collaboration between Isaac Asimov and Charles Harness.
The one flaw this has is that—a common series story failing—it comes to far too abrupt an end, otherwise this very readable and intriguing piece would easily have scored higher.
*** (Good). 12,200 words.