Fire and Iron

[Unseelie]

QUEEN ANNE was, of course, not a functioning AI, nor the Turing tape code Deiterville suspected. She was a girl, aged 14, suspended in a gel tank and fully plugged into a virtual control and reply mechanisim. Her body was entirely paralyzed, but then, she was so much more. She was the ship. Instead of eyelids, she had three thousand four hundred seven cameras fixed in lighting fixtures, a tractor beam instead of fingers, attitude thrusters replacing much of her left hand functioning...she was surrounded by the central aiming center, and a mock Turing tape, with autistic functionality. She was the culmination of the shrike project, the BAF had three hundred more just like her, and she did not exist. She could not.

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