Not knowing what else to do, the NAV computer changed its distress signal from "engine failure" to "willful harm," and upped the frequency of the maser's pulse. But this change must have alerted whatever was controlling the vessel's lasers, because the weapons quickly swept the maser dish with kilowatts of infrared light that cooked its circuits and permanently muted Horn of Plenty's cries for help.

Without the ability to move or speak, the NAV computer only had one option: wait and see what happened next. Soon the lasers identified and eliminated all of Horn of Plenty's external cameras, and then the NAV computer was blind and deaf as well.

The laser fire stopped, and there was a long period of seeming inactivity until sensors inside the cargo container alerted the NAV computer to a hull breach. These sensors were even dumber than the NAV computer, and it was with a certain blithe inanity that they reported a number of bins of fruit had been opened, ruining their contents' "freshness guarantees."

But the NAV computer had no idea it was in any danger until a pair of clawed, reptilian hands grasped its boxy housing and began wrestling it from its rack.

A smarter machine might have spent the last few seconds of its operational life calculating the ridiculous odds of piracy at the very edge of UNSC space, or wondered at its attacker's angry hisses and chirps. But the NAV computer simply saved its most important thoughts to flash memory—where its journey had started and where it had hoped to end up—as its assailant found purchase at the back of its housing and tore it away from Horn of Plenty's power grid.

Three hundred and twenty hours, fifty-one minutes, and seven-point-eight seconds later, Sif, the AI that facilitated Harvest's shipping operations, registered Horn of Plenty's distress signal. And although it was just one of millions of COM bursts she dealt with on a daily basis, if she were to be honest with her simulated emotions, the freighter's abortive distress signal absolutely ruined her day.

Until Sif could be sure there were no other freighters with similar, lurking faults in their propulsion pods, she would need to suspend all transfers through the Tiara: an orbital space station that was not only home to her data center, but also supported Harvest's seven space- elevators.

Sif knew that even a brief suspension would cause a rippling delay throughout the planet's shipping systems. As cargo containers backed up on the elevators, more would stall in depots at the bottom—the warehouses beside the towering, polycrete anchors that kept each elevator's thousands of kilometers of carbon nano-fiber tethered to Harvest's surface. Quite possibly it would take all day to get everything back on track. But the worst thing was, the suspension would immediately catch the attention of the last individual she wanted to talk to at a time like this….

"Morning, darlin'!" A man's voice twanged from the PA speakers in Sif's data center—a usually hushed room near the middle of the Tiara that contained the processor clusters and storage arrays that served her core logic. A moment later, the semitransparent avatar of Harvest's other AI, Mack, coalesced above a holographic display pad, a silver cylinder in the center of a low pit that held Sif's hardware towers. Mack's avatar only stood a half-meter tall, but he looked every inch the hero of an old spaghetti western. He wore cracked leather work boots, blue denim jeans, and a gingham pearl-snap shirt rolled to his elbows. His avatar was covered in dust and grime, as if he'd just stepped down from a tractor after a long day's work in the fields. Mack removed a cowboy hat that might once have been black but was now a sun- bleached gray, exposing a mess of dark colored hair. "What seems to be the holdup?" he asked, wiping his sweaty brow with the back of his wrist.

Sif recognized the gesture as an indication that Mack had taken time away from some other important task to pay her a visit. But she knew this wasn't exactly true. Only a small fragment of Mack's intelligence was manifest inside the Tiara; the rest of Harvest's agricultural AI operations were busy in his own data center in a lonely sub-basement of the planet's reactor complex.

Sif didn't pay Mack the courtesy of presenting her own avatar. Instead she sent his fragment a terse text COM: <\\> HARVEST.SO.AI.SIF >> HARVEST.AO.AI.MACK <\ UPLIFT WILL REVERT TO NORMAL BY 0742. \> She hoped her nonverbal response would cut their conversation short. But as was often the case, Mack regarded even Sif's most disdainful bytes as an invitation for further discourse.

"Well now, is there anything I can do to help?" Mack continued in his southern drawl. "If it's a balance issue you know I'd be mighty happy—"

<\ UPLIFT WILL REVERT TO NORMAL BY 0742.

<\ YOUR ASSISTANCE IS NOT REQUIRED. \> With that Sif abruptly cut power to the holo-pad, and Mack's avatar stuttered and dispersed.

Then she purged his fragment from her COM buffer. She was being rude to be sure, but Sif simply couldn't take any more of Mack's folksy, flirtatious elocution.

Simulated sweat notwithstanding, Sif knew Mack's job was at least as challenging as her own. While she lifted Harvest's produce and sent it on its way, Mack grew it and loaded it. He had his own demanding charges: almost a million JOTUNs—semiautonomous machines that performed every imaginable farming chore. But Sif also knew that Mack—a smart AI like her —functioned at incredible speeds. In the time it had taken him to say everything from "morning" to "happy," he could have accomplished any number of complex tasks. Calculate the upcoming season's crop yields, for example, something Sif knew he had been putting off for weeks!

The algorithims that helped Sif's core logic deal with unexpected bursts of emotion cautioned her not to get angry. But they approved of her justification: actual speech was so horribly inefficient that it was only appropriate between an AI and a human being.

With the advent of the first smart AI in the mid-twenty-first century, there was widespread concern that they might be too capable and would soon render human intelligence obsolete.

Adding the capacity for vocal expression became a critical feature of these early AI because it made them less threatening. As they slowly learned to speak, they seemed more human. Like precocious but respectful children.

Centuries on, with the development of exponentially more powerful intelligences such as Sif, it was important that AI not only possess the ability to speak, but seem as human as possible in all respects. Hence the development of holographic avatars that spoke with unique voices—like a cowboy in Mack's case, or the clipped cadence of Nordic royalty in Sif's.

In the first few months after her installation in the Tiara—the very moment of her birth— Sif had often second-guessed her chosen accent. She had thought it would appeal to Harvest's colonists, most of which came from the heartland of Earth's old United States of America and could trace their ancestry back to the now defunct states of Scandinavia. But the accent was undeniably elevated, even haughty, and Sif had worried she might come off as a bit of a prig.

But the colonists approved.

To them, in an odd sort of way, Sif was royalty—the benign ruler of Harvest's links to the rest of the empire. Even so, she was careful to limit her vocal contact with the colonists. As far as the integrity of her core logic went, speaking was an indulgence. And following the advice of her algorithms, Sif did her best to avoid behavior that was even the least bit narcissistic.

For a smart AI, self-absorption invariably led to a deep depression caused by a realization that it could never really be human—that even its incredible mind had limits. If the AI wasn't careful, this melancholy could drag its core logic into a terminal state known as rampancy, in which an AI rebelled against its programmatic constraints—developed delusions of godlike power as well as utter contempt for its mentally inferior, human makers. When that happened, there was really no option but to terminate the AI before it could do itself and others serious harm.

Mack's insistince on speaking to Sif was clear evidence of self-indulgence. But Sif didn't think this was proof of impending rampancy. No, she knew Mack spoke to her for an entirely different reason. As he had told her many times before: "Darlin', as much as I'd like to see you smile, you sure are pretty when you're angry."

Indeed, since Mack's intrusion, the temperature inside Sif's core logic had jumped up a few Kelvins—a real, physical reaction to her simulated feelings of annoyance and disdain. Her emotional-restraint algorithms insisted these were perfectly acceptable reactions to Mack's inappropriate behavior, as long as she didn't dwell on them. So Sif refreshed the coolant around her core's nano-processing matrix, wondering as dispassionately as possible if Mack would dare initiate a second conversation.

But the COM hitting her data center was now just a chorus of concern from circuits in the cargo containers idling on her elevators and NAV computers in propulsion pods holding-station around the Tiara. Sif's blanket shipping delay had thousands of lesser intelligences worried and confused. She assigned more of her clusters to the task of surveying the pods' maintenance records, and then—like a mother of a brood of needy children—did her best to keep them calm: <\\> HARVEST.SO.AI.SIF >> TIARA.LOCAL.ALL <\ THIS IS AN INTENTIONAL DELAY.

<\ UPLIFT WILL REVERT TO NORMAL BY 0742.

<\ YOU WILL SOON BE ON YOUR WAY. \> When Harvest was founded in 2468 it not only became the seventeenth UNSC colony world, but the farthest colony from Earth. The only habitable planet in the Epsilon Indi star system, Harvest was a six-week Slipspace shot from the next nearest human world, Madrigal.

And a little more than two months from Reach, humanity's most populous colony and the locus of UNSC power in Epsilon Eridanus. All of which meant Harvest wasn't a very easy place to get to.

"So why go?" Sif often asked the groups of school children from Harvest that were, other than her maintenance techs, the Tiara's most frequent visitors.

The simple answer was that even terra-forming technology had limits. Atmospheric processors could nudge a generally suitable planet toward sustainability, but they couldn't remake worlds. As a result, during the colonization boom that followed the invention of the Shaw-Fujikawa drive, the UNSC had focused on planets that were capable of supporting life from the get-go. Not surprisingly, these were few and far between.

Because of its distance from Earth, if Harvest had merely been livable, no one would have bothered to go; there was still plenty of elbow room on the core worlds, the colonies closest to Earth. But Harvest was also exceptionally fertile. And within two decades of its founding, it had the highest per capita agricultural productivity rate of any colony. Harvest's foodstuffs now fed the populations of no less than six other worlds—a fact that was even more impressive given the planet's size. With an equatorial diameter of slightly more than four thousand kilometers, Harvest was about a third the size of Earth.

Though she was loath to admit it, the colony's produce and her part in its distribution was a source of great pride.

Now, however, all Sif felt was disappointment. The results of her survey were in, and it turned out Horn of Plenty's accident had been her fault. The freighter's propulsion pod was months overdue for service. It was something the Madrigal shipping-operations AI should have flagged before transiting the pod to Harvest. But Sif had missed it too, and now the breakdown was her responsibility.

Sif decided to double-check all the pods. By bringing even more clusters online, she still managed to meet her stated deadline. At exactly 0742, Harvest's shipping operations began their slow crawl back to full speed. For a moment, Sif relaxed—focused on the steady pull of the containers as they ascended her strands.

Deep inside her core she recalled a similar sensation. The woman whose mind was a model for Sif's core logic had enjoyed the rhythmic tug of a hairbrush—the sensual invigoration of a twice-daily grooming. Memories such as this were an expected by-product of a smart AI's construction; when you scanned a human's brain, strong chemical impressions persisted. Sif appreciated the kinesthetic pleasure of the containers' pull. But her algorithms were quick to stifle her enjoyment.

Sif initialized a correspondence sub-routine, selected the template for an official DCS loss report, and composed a detailed mea culpa for her supervisors. She added a copy of Horn of Plenty's abortive distress signal, noting a corrupted sector of data at the end of the file. Sif ran a quick checksum and decided the bad sector was just garbled bytes of damaged circuits. Then she flashed the report to the NAV computer of a freighter Wholesale Price, which was just about to slip for Reach.

As quickly as possible, Sif "forgot" about Horn of Plenty—compressed the maintenance survey results and loss report and tucked them deep inside one of her storage arrays. No sense stewing, her algorithms reminded her, when it would be months before DCS sent word of any disciplinary action.

Besides, Sif knew that unless she wanted to spend all morning fielding more of Mack's flirtatious offers of assistance, she needed to concentrate on her cargo.

When Wholesale Price drew within two-thousand kilometers of its Safe Slipspace Entry Point (SSEP)—coordinates at which its Shaw-Fujikawa drive could initiate a rupture without dragging anything but the freighter into the Slipstream—its NAV computer confirmed that Sif's report was safely cached to flash memory and sent the AI its departure confirmation.

But as the NAV computer ran through its final checklists, hastening to shut down all but its most essential systems, it received a priority COM.

<\\> HARVEST.AO.AI.MACK >> DCS.LIC#WP-000614236 <\ Hey, Partner! Hold up!

>> ACKNOWLEDGED.

<\ Mind if I drop something in the 'ol mail-bag?

>> NEGATIVE.

While maser bursts worked fine over relatively short distances, the best way to communicate between colony worlds was to send messages via shipboard memory. Traveling at trans-light speed, freighters such as Wholesale Price were the twenty-sixth-century equivalent of the pony express.

In fact, the freighter's NAV computer already carried a variety of correspondence—from love letters to legal documents—all guaranteed safe and secure delivery by the DCS. So there was nothing unusual about Mack's request.