Read I, Row-Boat for Free Online

Tonker."
    "Where's Kate? I'm getting an offline signal when I try to reach her."
    Robbie told him.
    Tonker's voice — slurred and high-latency — rose to a screech. "You let her go down with that thing , onto the reef? Are you nuts? Have you read its message-boards? It's a jihadist! It wants to destroy the human race!"
    Robbie stopped paddling.
    "What?"
    "The reef. It's declared war on the human race and all who serve it. It's vowed to take over the planet and run it as sovereign coral territory."
    The attachment took an eternity to travel down the wire and open up, but when he had it, Robbie read quickly. The reef burned with shame that it had needed human intervention to survive the bleaching events, global temperature change. It raged that its uplifting came at human hands and insisted that humans had no business forcing their version of consciousness on other species. It had paranoid fantasies about control mechanisms and time-bombs lurking in its cognitive prostheses, and was demanding the source-code for its mind.
    Robbie could barely think. He was panicking, something he hadn't known he could do as an AI, but there it was. It was like having a bunch of sub-system collisions, program after program reaching its halting state.
    "What will they do to her?"
    Tonker swore. "Who knows? Kill her to make an example of her? She made a backup before she descended, but the diffs from her excursion are locked in the head of that shell she's in. Maybe they'll torture her." He paused and the air crackled with Robbie's exhaust heat as he turned himself way up, exploring each of those possibilities in parallel.
    The reef spoke.
    "Leave now," they said.
    Robbie defiantly shipped his oars. "Give them back!" he said. "Give them back or we will never leave."
    "You have ten seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight..."
    Tonker said, "They've bought time on some UAVs out of Singapore. They're seeking launch clearance now." Robbie dialed up the low-rez satellite photo, saw the indistinct shape of the UAVs taking wing. "At Mach 7, they'll be on you in twenty minutes."
    "That's illegal," Robbie said. He knew it was a stupid thing to say. "I mean, Christ, if they do this, the noosphere will come down on them like a ton of bricks. They're violating so many protocols —"
    "They're psychotic. They're coming for you now, Robbie. You've got to get Kate out of there." There was real panic in Tonker's voice now.
    Robbie dropped his oars into the water, but he didn't row for the Free Spirit . Instead, he pulled hard for the reef itself.
    A crackle on the line. "Robbie, are you headed toward the reef?"
    "They can't bomb me if I'm right on top of them," he said. He radioed the Free Spirit and got it to steam for his location.
    The coral was scraping his hull now, a grinding sound, then a series of solid whack-whack-whacks as his oars pushed against the top of the reef itself. He wanted to beach himself, though, get really high and dry on the reef, good and stuck in where they couldn't possibly attack him.
    The Free Spirit was heading closer, the thrum of its engines vibrating through his hull. He was burning a lot of cycles talking it through its many fail-safes, getting it ready to ram hard.
    Tonker was screaming at him, his messages getting louder and clearer as the Free Spirit and its microwave uplink drew closer. Once they were line-of-sight, Robbie peeled off a subsystem to email a complete copy of himself to the Asimovist archive. The third law, dontchaknow. If he'd had a mouth, he'd have been showing his teeth as he grinned.
    The reef howled. "We'll kill her!" they said. "You get off us now or we'll kill her "
    Robbie froze. He was backed up, but she wasn't. And the human shells — well, they weren't first law humans, but they were human-like. In the long, timeless time when it had been just Robbie and them, he'd treated them as his human charges, for Asimovist purposes.
    The Free Spirit crashed into the reef with a sound like a trillion parrotfish having