[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless by Kate Russell Page A

risk.’
    Angel looked from the hovering biscuit tin to her wrist.
    ‘DORIS?’
    ‘Detail Oriented Remote Investment Surveillance bot. It’s chipped with a database of sound financial decisions and programmed to make suggestions about the best course of action based on your current status.’
    ‘Best from whose perspective?’ Angel was highly suspicious of the whirring computational tin. She’d heard a whisper about this kind of development on the uniweb. Some people had dubbed the technology ‘conscience bots’.
    ‘Why, from the investor’s perspective of course.’
    ‘I suppose this is a geo-tag?’ Angel asked, twisting the clamp around her wrist.
    ‘Clever girl, and don’t even think about tampering with it as I have a personal link to the output and will come after you so hard it will feel like being run over by a meteor. Likewise if you try and leave the bot behind; if it gets more than fifty metres away I come looking for you, and I won’t be amused. Understood?’
    This day just gets better and better, Angel thought, before brushing past both the captain and her escort to get suited up.
    ‘What do you think?’
    The small propellers holding the hover-bot aloft whirred a little faster and it followed her out of the door.
    * * *
    Angel pulled the keyboard out of its storage slot and tucked it under the flight-desk clamp in front of her, leaning back in the command chair as she checked the ship’s forward display. She looked down at the “H” key, worn to sheen and no longer actually showing the letter “H” at all. Most people used voice-control these days but she’d never fancied that upgrade, even though it wasn't expensive. She preferred to be in physical control of her ship, punching in the co-ordinates she wanted to travel to directly rather than asking it politely to take her somewhere.
    ‘That mode of interface is outdated and ineffective.’
    Angel nearly jumped out of her flight suit at the voice that came out of the whirring bot that had entered the cockpit behind her.
    ‘So you speak? You scared the living space out of me!’
    ‘I am fitted with a voice synthesiser and speech recognition circuits to better deliver my analysis and recommendations.’
    ‘Your analysis?’
    ‘Based on comparisons from a database of over fifty billion possible scenarios sampled from a cross-section of mainstream trade negotiations and professions, crowd-sourced from across the galaxy since 2566. I am a personal drone programmed to continually analyse your decisions and suggest a better course of action when the data reveals one.’
    ‘Perfect. So I am saddled with an electronic know-it-all as well as a suicide mission?’
    DORIS whirred momentarily.
    ‘I found no record of a suicide instruction in the contract details. Your interface is obsolete though.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘That keyboard contraption that looks like it belongs in a museum. Why have you not upgraded to voice-control?’
    Angel glanced at the plastic relic on her dashboard, accumulating dust and grime from years of hauling minerals and rock. There was a certain beautiful irony in the fact that this question was being posed by what seemed likely to be the most annoying collection of computer circuits attached to a voice synthesiser ever invented.
    ‘No comment.’
    The drone whirred as the lights in its processor core flashed.
    ‘I calculate an eighty-five percent increase in productivity if you upgrade to voice assisted controls. This is an unprecedented amount.’
    ‘Matched by an equal drop in mental acuity,’ Angel started punching numbers into the keyboard, gritting her teeth.
    The drone’s circuits flashed busily.
    ‘Your assessment of the data does not compute.’
    ‘I didn’t assess any data. I made an observation; formed an opinion. It’s what we do, us humans. It’s why we are superior to machines,’ Angel turned to the hovering bot and looked at it meaningfully, ‘like you.’
    DORIS whirred with an air of