The AI often created astrogational simulations. They were staggeringly complex, but at least finite. Metaspace was predictable; reality could be anticipated with a high degree of precision. But the machine's model of Rathere's aesthetic was post-hoc, a retrofit to her pure, instinctive gestures. It raised more questions than it answered.
While Rathere slept, the machine wondered how one learned to have intuition.
The elections came, and the radicals and their allies seized a razor-thin majority in the planetary Diet. Isaah cheered as his craft rose through the ocean. A scoop was within reach. He headed for a distant and obscure ore-producing system, expending vast quanities of fuel, desperate to be the first scoop there.
Rathere stood beside her rejoicing father, looking out through the receding ocean a bit sadly. She stroked her shoulder absently, touching the minder still stretched across her skin.
The minder's epidermal configuration had become permanent. Its strands were distributed to near invisibility in a microfiber-thin mesh across Rathere. Its nanorepair mechanisms attended to her zits and the errant hairs on her upper lip. It linked with her medical implants, the ship's AI taking control over the nuances of her insulin balance, her sugar level, and the tiny electrical jolts that kept her muscles fit. Rathere slept without covers now, the minder's skein warming her with a lattice of microscopic heating elements. In its ever-present blanket, she began to neglect sub-vocalizing their conversations, her endless one-sided prattle annoying Isaah on board the tiny ship.
"Zero point-five-six?" muttered Isaah to himself at the next customs sweep. The AI was developing much faster than its parameters should allow. Something unexpected was happening with the unit, and they were a long way from home. Unless Isaah was very careful, the AI might reach personhood before they returned to the HC.
He sent a coded message to an acquaintance in the Home Cluster, someone who dealt with such situations, just in case. Then he turned his attention to the local newsfeed.
The heavy element market showed no sudden changes over the last few weeks. Isaah's gamble had apparently paid off. He had stayed ahead of the widening ripples of news about the ocean planet's election. The economic Shockwave wasn't here yet.
He felt the heady thrill of a scoop, of secret knowledge that was his alone. It was like prognostication, a glimpse into the future. Elements extracted by giant turbine from that distant world's oceans were also mined from this system's asteroid belt. Soon, everyone here would be incrementally richer as the ocean planet pulled its mineral wealth from the Expansion common market. The markets would edge upwards across the board.
Isaah began to place his bets.
The dark-skinned boy looked down upon the asteroid field with a pained expression. Rathere watched the way his long bangs straightened, then curled to encircle his cheeks again when he raised his head. But her stomach clenched when she looked down through the transparent floor; the party was on the lowest level of a spin-gravitied ring, and black infinity seemed to be pulling at her through the glassene window. The AI lovingly recorded the parameters of this unfamiliar vertigo.
"More champers, Darien?" asked the fattest, oldest boy at the party.
"You can just make out a mining ship down there," the dark-skinned boy answered.
"Oh, dear," said the fat boy. "Upper-class guilt. And before dinner."
The dark-skinned boy shook his head. "It's just that seeing those poor wretches doesn't make me feel like drinking."
The fat boy snorted.
"This is what I think of your poor little miners," he said, upending the bottle. A stream of champagne gushed and then sputtered from the bottle, spread fizzing on the floor. The other party-goers laughed, politely scandalized, then murmured appreciatively as the floor cleaned itself, letting the champagne pass through to the hard vaccuum on the other side, where it flash-froze (shattered by its own air bubbles), then floated away peacefully in myriad, sunlit galaxies.
There were a few moments of polite applause.
Darien looked at Rathere woundedly, as if hoping that she, an outsider, might come to his aid.
The anguish in his dark, beautiful face sent a shiver through her, a tremor that resonated through every level of the AI.
"Comeon, dammit!" she subvocalized.
"Two seconds," the minder's voice reassured.
The ring was home to the oligarchs who controlled the local system's mineral wealth. A full fifteen years old by now, Rathere had fallen into the company of their pleasure-obsessed children, who never stopped staring at her exotic skin and hair, and who constantly exchanged droll witticisms. Rathere, her socialization limited to her father and the doting AI, was unfamiliar with the art of banter. She didn't like being intimidated by locals. The frustration was simply and purely unbearable.
"The price of that champagne could have bought one of those miners out of debt peonage," Darien said darkly.
"Just the one?" asked the fat boy, looking at the label with mock concern.
The group laughed again, and Darien's face clouded with another measure of suffering.
"Now!" Rathere mind-screamed. "I hate that fat guy!"
The AI hated him, too.
The search cascaded across its processors, the decompressed data of its libraries clobbering astrogation calculations it had performed only hours before. That didn't matter. It would be weeks before Isaah would be ready to depart, and the exigencies of conversation did not allow delay. The library data included millennia of plays, novels, films, interactives. To search them quickly, the AI needed vast expanses of memory space.
"Maybe when my little golden shards of champagne drift by, some miner will think, T could've used that money, " the fat boy said almost wistfully. "But then again, if they thought about money at all, would they be so far in debt?"
The fat boy's words were added to the search melange, thickening it by a critical degree. A dozen hits appeared in the next few milliseconds, and the AI chose one quickly.
"There is only one class..."
"... that thinks more about money than the rich," repeated Rathere.
There was a sudden quiet throughout the party, the silence of waiting for more.
"And that is the poor," she said.
Darien looked at Rathere quizzically, as if she were being too glib. She paused a moment, editing the rest of the quote in her head.
"The poor can think of nothing else but money," she said carefully. "That is the misery of being poor."