Chapter 9B: Intermission

I looked up from my reading to see that Lori had seated herself next to me and was reading over my shoulder. "Well?" she said in a questioning tone.

"I've never dealt with contracts so I have no idea whether this is hiding worse stuff than me selling myself to the Confederacy," I admitted.

"What I think it is, that you should use that thing they gave you to keep people quiet and get a lawyer to look it over," Lori said.

"Do you happen to have any suggestions with regard to which lawyer we should see?" I asked.

"We really don't have to hurry much, do we," Lori asked.

"I don't think so, but I expect that it would be just as well if we didn't dawdle about what has to happen either," I said.

"You're supposed to recruit other people to join your crew as well as gather materiel for sale to the aliens and for trade with the colonies too aren't you?" Lori asked, proving that she had read most of the information that I'd been provided. I nodded in answer to her question. "So which should you do first? Form a crew or get the goods?"

"Get the goods," I said, "they can be stored at my place. I've got plenty of room for everything except the livestock and for that I'll have to understand the way that Confederate technology works a bit better."

"What d you mean by that?" Lori asked.

"I mean that even a fast transit to the nearest system is going to take something on the order of a couple of weeks," I told her. "I may have been a farm boy fifty years ago but I don't think I want to play Noah to a bunch of critters while transporting them all across the human diaspora."

"That is an issue," Lori agreed, "But you do know, however don't you, that frozen sperm, at least, is available so you could just take fertile females of each type?" I nodded to that as I was somewhat aware of the practice although the farming my father and grandfather had done had not involved much livestock.

"It looks to me like people want some pets and maybe some meat animals as well. I suppose that in both cases there are people who believe that establishing breeding populations away from the Earth is a good idea. The plants look like some or all of the colonies want to get into brewing and wine making. I don't understand why they would want either if replicators can provide essentially everything that they could need or even want," I mused.

"Rumor has it that replicators don't make good booze," Lori told me.

I looked at the clock and though I'd enjoyed my time with Lori I had a thought that I really should get back to my place. I wanted to check on a few things there and to have some time when no one else was present or pressuring me in order to consider what had been proposed to me by the Confederacy. I told Lori as much and she nodded a bit sadly while saying, "I guess this means that you don't want me to make a list of friends I think I could live the rest of my life with?"

"Do you have any clue how long we'll actually live with Darjee technology?" I asked.

"Not really, do you know?" Lori said.

I wanted to tell her what I'd surmised but found the first limitation placed upon me by the nanites that had been added to my blood stream. I couldn't say any more than, "I think it might be longer than you can imagine."

"Eternal life?" Lori asked tentatively.

I shook my head and said, "I really don't know Lori, but I think that going as slowly as the Confederacy will allow is very wise."

"Go home and hide for as long as you can, Joe," Lori told me with a bit of derision in her voice.

I took Sheba's leash and led her out and although she didn't ever perk up as much as she usually did when she was walking with me it seemed to me that she did get less sullen as we neared my driveway. Each step closer to our home after that brought a spring into both of our strides. When I arrived on the porch of my house there was something there that I'd never seen before. It looked a good deal like the med-tube that I'd been in at the hospital. "What is this?" I asked, never expecting an answer.

"I borrowed a drone and had a sleep trainer delivered here," a voice I thought I recognized as belonging to the James Cook spoke from near or from in the device.

"Why did you do that?" I asked.

"I have been making a tour of the worlds that have been given to humans. I have requested and received reports on the ability of humans to adapt to the conditions of those worlds and to life with a supervisory AI. I think I have found some things that are very disturbing. In order to confirm or disprove my working theory I have been downloading and working through the entire base of knowledge that humanity has consigned to the network of computers that humanity has built.

"It is my belief that I need to attempt to communicate with the main companion animals that are common to humans. Other AIs may ignore them and even try to eliminate them. But to me they seem integral to the process of insuring the long-term health of humans. The most common of those animals seem to be dogs and cats. With that in mind if you could persuade your companion, Sheba to enter the sleep trainer to be evaluated I would appreciate it." The cover to that machine rolled back as the James Cook's AI was speaking to me. It revealed what appeared to be a bed that was slightly larger than a standard double that stood at about the height of the bed I had made up in the house. Unlike the med-tube at the hospital this machine was not in essence a tub with deep sides.

I asked the air around me about that, feeling a bit silly but at the same time realizing that most likely the sleep trainer had a microphone pickup that meant that I would be talking to the AI that controlled it. My supposition was correct and the AI of the James Cook explained that the med-tube that I'd been placed in at the hospital was designed especially for the worst cases.

I thought about some of the various auto accidents that I'd seen in my career of driving around the city. I thought that to have such machines available in all hospitals would be wonderful if there were enough of them to make a difference in the number of deaths and life altering injuries that were sustained just in the city where I lived. Obviously such a fantasy would be short lived as Earth was in the direct path of the Sa'arm expansion and therefore any employment of such technology in our cities would be vastly limited.