Page 2 of The Hornet’s Hucow Pet

Or maybe those were to gift us some fun. An enrichment exercise.

The ICSS operators who worked with us were mostly Avioids, sapients like anthropomorphic birds capable of mimicking human speech without much accent. They learned English and all our languages so they could converse with us directly, developing bonds deeper than those enabled by our neural translator implants. With their colorful feathers and short stature, it was hard to find them threatening.

But I noticed something. They didn’t know why the computers served us each puzzle either. Every city ship had a primary computer that optimized every aspect of living. When a problem could be more efficiently or creatively solved by humans than by its own inner cores, it served that problem to us.

If anyone in the ICSS knew how that computer worked, they didn’t live on the city ship with us. At times, our Avioid operators knew as little as we did about the machine’s incomprehensible inner workings.

After more than fifteen years working as a node in that computer, I noticed patterns. And one particular problem set caught my eye.

It was a decay problem where a complex set of variables caused an output line to rapidly drop. Our job was to keep that line as high as possible. Each variable was just a letter with an equation of its own, totally abstracted. We developed optimal solves for dozens of little branches of that problem, and the best we could do on that main line was hold it at ninety-seven point seven three percent.

The week after, we didn’t work, forced to stay in our cots on lockdown—a new virus had mutated and spread, and it was particularly vicious.

Deaths were rare on the city ship, but that virus was deadly. Horrifyingly deadly.

Almost three percent of the ship’s population died.

To be exact…

Two point two seven percent.

The exact amount we couldn’t save in our optimization problem.

I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep.

Had this been inevitable, and we were heroes, saving lives every time we drove the output number higher?

Or were we complicit in some sick experiment, some brutal culling of the weak?

I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d noticed. The Avioids we worked with were genuinely anxious, equally grieved. They had no idea.

I was quarantined for fear that my symptoms were from the virus, despite the negative test results. The symptoms were from the virus—I just didn’t contract it directly.

The only reason I had the exact casualty percentage is that I’d calculated it myself. It had never been included in the official reports.

If the outbreak had been planned, and I saw too much, perhaps the computer would think me better off dead.

Or, if it really had all been benevolent, how could I subject my friends to this same bone-chilling doubt? My cubicle partner had lost his elderly mother. The revelation that we were somehow involved would break him. Which variable, if nudged this way or that, would have spared his mother? How many others would it have killed to do so?

I held all those questions within myself, like a cyst hardening around a different kind of deadly pathogen.

The pain was the worst it had ever been. I could hardly walk, let alone work.

The ICSS doctors ran every test, tried every drug. I did hypnosis and psychotherapy. But I never spilled that dark secret of my heart. I couldn’t.

The pain got worse and worse.

I mustered the strength to go back to work, but it was mostly to say goodbye.

They could tell, could see the exhaustion in my eyes. They told me retirement would be nice.

We all knew I’d be bored out of my mind.

I didn’t plan on retiring, anyway.

The ICSS had tried every legal drug.

I’d solved enough equations that had the patterns of illegal drug smuggling to know that it happened, and at what scale.