Dead Space by Kali Wallace (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

me—but she didn’t seem uneasy. Quite the opposite. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

“How did you divide up your duties?” Adisa asked.

“We’ve never had a very rigorous division. I handle most of the Overseer’s cooperation with the subsidiary and auxiliary systems, such as the mining and manufacturing, power generation, intrastation transport. David handles—handled—most of the higher-level and external functions. He was better with the big picture than with the details. He took care of the efficiency algorithms. And the communications arrays,” she added pointedly, after the briefest pause. “What happened to the optical array? All we’ve been told is that it’s out of commission for now.”

“That’s part of what we’re looking into. Who handles the security system?” Adisa asked.

“David, mostly, but there have never been many security threats.” A pause. “Until now.”

“And surveillance?”

“David, again, but he didn’t spend much time with it. The surveillance system is not meant to have a lot of human interference—as you well know. The Overseer handles anything that comes up.”

“Did David ever ask you about Aeolia?” he asked.

Ping raised her delicate eyebrows. The question surprised her. “Why would you ask that?”

“Did he?”

“Not for some time, I don’t think. We spoke about it briefly when he first came here—professional curiosity only. There wasn’t much I could tell him that’s not in the official reports.”

“What was he curious about, specifically?” I asked.

Ping looked at me for the first time since she had sat down, and when she answered, it was with the air of someone who was consciously humoring me. “Like everybody else, he mostly wanted to know how a virus could infect an Overseer. It’s not supposed to be possible, but I think we all know that Parthenope going around telling everybody it was impossible was an irresistible challenge to the wrong sort of people.” She paused thoughtfully. “If we’re being honest, I do wonder if David’s concern was a bit more personal. I think he wanted to understand how Aeolia’s Overseer could have made such terrible mistakes. I did everything I could to assure him we had learned quite a lot from the incident and those mistakes wouldn’t happen again, but . . .” She shrugged slightly. “I understood his worry, because I’ve shared it. I can still smell them, do you know? All those people. The smell lingers.”

She was looking at Adisa again, waiting for him to respond, but he remained quiet.

So I asked, “Does Nimue’s Overseer make mistakes?”

“Goodness, no. Nimue is terribly reliable. It’s quite set in its ways. But that can be its own problem, can’t it?”

“How so?” I asked.

“The Overseers are powerful AIs, but they’re very predictable, so they can be tricked. That’s what happened on Aeolia. And now it’s happened here, as well? You can tell me the truth, Inspector.” She was still smiling as she spoke to Adisa. Mary Ping smiled too much for somebody who had lost a colleague all of thirty hours ago and was now being interrogated by OSD officers. She smiled too much for anybody. “Not to the same extent, obviously, but the responsible party must have circumvented the surveillance system, or you wouldn’t be here talking to me. You would have identified the murderer as soon as you arrived, and that handsome lawyer would be drafting a statement that firmly absolved Parthenope of any liability or culpability in the matter—tell me, Safety Inspector Adisa, what is Mr. van Arendonk doing here anyway? This is hardly a matter that requires his presence. If you had surveillance, you would already be on your way back to your husband. Oh.” Ping pressed her fingers to her lips. She was looking at Adisa with dancing bright eyes. “I forgot. He’s gone back to Earth, hasn’t he?”

Adisa didn’t acknowledge her questions. He asked, “When did you last speak to David Prussenko?”

“You don’t already know? Is the surveillance gap that extensive?”

“We’d like to hear it from you, yeah?”

“Very well. It was just after dinner, the night before he died. I asked him to swap overnight shifts with me.”

“Why?”

“I had a bit of a headache. I was overtired from a late shift the day before. It was nothing serious. We traded shifts all the time.”

“Was there anything unusual about his behavior that night?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Was he upset? Happy? Nervous? That day or anytime in the days before?”

“No, not at all. But you really should ask his friends. They’ll know more. You have to understand.” She sat forward; her expression turned earnest. “I had absolutely no reason to want David dead. I liked him. We worked well together. I had no personal or professional quarrel with him.” She turned to meet my eyes. “This must be so hard for you. David spoke about you sometimes. He didn’t like to talk about Symposium, but he was a great admirer of your work.”

Her easy words felt like a weight in the center of my chest. She was still smiling.

“As am I,” she went on. “I followed your work on the Titan Vanguard AI for years. Tell me—did you choose that name intentionally? The Vanguard satellites of the twentieth century weren’t terribly successful. The first one crashed as soon as it launched. Seems an unlucky name to choose.”

I swallowed; my throat was dry. I didn’t know how to answer. I decided to try to match her calm. “It was chosen by committee. They decided that ruling out mission names simply because they coincided with unsuccessful American projects from centuries ago would eliminate rather too much of the English language.”

“How very typical. I confess I am a bit flustered right now. It’s not every day you get to meet the creator of such an innovative AI.”

She did not look remotely flustered. I was the one who felt a nervous twitch in my fingers, the smallness of the room around us, the urge to shift in my seat and lean away.

“I didn’t create Vanguard alone,” I said. “We had a large team. Sunita Radieh was the lead scientist.”

“Oh, but everybody knows that when a leader takes credit for a major achievement,