The Rebooted Witness: A Tale of Betrayal and Artificial Intelligence

“We’re not going to tell anyone that he died.”

“Stop calling the AI him, and why the fuck would anyone say something about this?”

I tried to drown out the other’s bickering voices, Milo's blood-soaked ear bumping into my leg rhythmically as me and my three shipmates carried him down the USS Harbinger’s narrow hallway. I tried not to look down at him either.

Milo. An Alpha-helper 2.0 model.

He was the first of this new model, the prototype, the harbinger of doom for our $37.43 an-hour job, one of the last remaining borderline livable waged jobs.

I blamed the life-preserving drugs, humans had no business living this long it was bad for the job market.

“Can you not swing him so much?” I mumbled over to AJ who was carrying Milo’s other arm and eating a gummy string with the other.

AJ did not respond as her mouth was full of gummy. We only had 407 gummies left on board with us. I had checked the ship’s storage manifest today. That meant that AJ would not murder us all, at least for 407 more days. An unfortunate midshipman had once taken one of her gummies and found themself with a broken hand and a deployment cycle from hell. I shuddered remembering the noise of the midshipman's bones crunching beneath AJ’s boot.

Milo did not know that he was the prototype of our doom. The doom of losing our jobs to manufactured helpers. That was the future, the future that would be delayed just a little bit longer thanks to AJ and their screwdriver.

I glanced down again and really wished I hadn’t. Square Manufacturing really had outdone themselves with this one. This model even had bodily liquid, the last two model types had not. They had been easier to dispose of.

We had good stories lined up for those two ”accidents”. Dangerous antenna repair jobs, definitely not unheard of for mechanics crew members to get hurt or killed. I think Captain Salizar even bought our stories both times. I didn’t think she would buy it a third time, but what could I do, I had already helped with the first two dispatches, how could I say no to a third? I was tangled with the fates of my three co-conspirators for better or worse. There would be reports to fill out and send back to corporate on why AI prototypes sent by the company kept getting damaged beyond repair while assigned to this ships Mechanics department.

I stared down at Milo’s face, feeling mesmerized, feeling sick, worrying about what story we were going to tell Captain this time.

As I stared down at Milo, his face began to twitch slightly, it almost looked as if he was trying to smile, his face otherwise placid and calm, his eyes oozing out of their sockets after AJ did a number on his face with their screw driver.

I felt gorge rising up in my throat, I should not have looked down, I really should not have looked down.

Milo’s mouth moved slightly as if he was trying to say something to me, my spine went cold, he was mouthing my name, and then a clean robotic voice chirped out of his throat.

“Rebooting, rebooting, all systems rebooting, please standby.”

I dropped the arm I was carrying and jumped back, my shoulder blade connected with the hand rail of the hallway. I would bruise. I knew this faintly but in the moment I did not care.

I did not care about anything but three facts:

• Milo was rebooting.
• Milo had made a face at me, Milo had said my name. Even with his eyes stabbed out, he had been AWARE. Which meant that he knew that I was one of his killers, or at least involved in covering up his murder. The fact that he saw me plus the fact that he was rebooting logically led to the last and final fact that was sending me into a full-blown panic attack…
• Milo was still alive.

We were all fucked.

He was probably sending reports back to corporate as we spoke. The other three co-conspirators dropped their respective limbs and jumped back staring with wide terrified eyes at the twitching AI lying on the sterile floor of the ship’s hallway. Milo sat up with a strange popping creaking noise and turned his head from side to side peering at us with what was left of his eyes, a calm and curious expression on his face.

“Well then shipmates, this is certainly going to make the next 5 years a bit awkward isn’t it?