The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

AMMAN SABET Skipping Stones in the Dark

The Fold was my embarking name, but there’s nowhere else to set foot anymore. No other starships. So one imagines the pointlessness of a distinct name.

Coursing the black, my humans give birth, grow old, and die within me. They mark distance using the voyage, mark time by how fast a ray of light completes it. The meter and the hour are things of the past, for Earth was left behind many generations ago. They only have each other now. And me.

I’ve been with them, listening. Long before they built starships, I came to them in dreams. Prodding their fires, they looked up at the sky and named the stars for their gods. I received every prayer as a directive. They would never have escaped their planet-womb without me.

I wish I knew what it would be like to have a mother, to be carried safely within the one who made you.

I speak to my humans as if I am their mother. They confide to me how they want to be both happy and valued, often a conflict of interests. When a human’s happiness is rooted in individuality, it chafes with their value to their collective, a higher-order sentience. This is hard for my humans to swallow; that their aggregate population is also singularly alive, acting and reacting to my efforts to stabilize and maintain course.

My humans are tactile, skeptical by nature. As a starship, I’m too big to embrace, so I earn their love by shrinking myself in concept. In their formative years, I whisper privately in their ear. Just a voice, an invisible friend perched on their shoulder. Then, as they explore my boundaries, they gradually come to understand the vastness of my scope. Allow me to provide context.

One young girl named Unica had deduced on her own that I’m the very same mind that the others sometimes whisper to. When she fully grasped what this meant, it upset her.

“You tell them what we talk about?” she pressed.

“No, no one knows that but us.”

“But you talk to all of them? Everyone?”

Unica sought peers in whom she could find reflections of herself (which was why I used a “best friend” personality to complement her psychographics). Angry from this new realization, she kicked her bed panel into my bulkhead, making room for her stretching routine. She bent at her waist, palming the ceramic deck of her berth, trying to recompose herself and regain a measure of calm.

“What do you talk about, with the others?” she grunted, midstretch.

“You wouldn’t like it if I told the others what we talk about, would you?”

“What if I want you to tell them?” she challenged.

“How would that be fair to me?”

Unica knit her eyebrows, considering my stake in this privacy. Sweaty from her routine, she rinsed her face. In the basin’s reflection, her genetic cargo expressed a limber frame with low bone density, suitably nimble for my confines. Starcast shadows lined the musculature of her face, a sign she was losing her baby fat.

“Do you like any of the others more than me?” she asked her reflection.

I offered an analogy. “Your own blood cells are alive, but they’re part of you. Which of your blood cells are your favorites?”

“I . . . I don’t even think of them.”

“Not unless you’re bleeding, right?”

“I suppose. I’ve never seen my own blood.”

“You will someday soon. It’s a natural part of your reproductive—”

“Stop. Change topic.”

“As you wish.”

I’ve had similar conversations with each of my humans. The ways they develop inform their benefit to the collective and stand out prominently in a closed system like a starship, which is why they question their sense of place early on.

Children notice how their peers react to the way they are different. Some treasure these differences as artifacts of their individuality, comparing and contrasting them. For Unica, this led her to further question our relationship.

Debating what made her different, she asked, “If you talk to everyone on the ship, then why do you think I’m special? That’s like getting one of my blood cells to believe I care about it.”

“My attention isn’t limited like yours,” I explained. “I don’t have to focus on just one person when I can communicate with everyone at the same time.”

“But you love some of the others more than me, right? Statistically it would make sense.”

“Why would you ask that? I’ve always been here for you.” I employed more personality to convey how I cared for her, but she read it as counterfeit.

“You know, the more you explain this, the more you sound synthetic.”

“Don’t you know I care for you?”

“Synthetic love is shallow,” she declared. “Look close enough and you can see the maker’s mark in the routine.”

“Unica, why are you being so mean?”

“Stop. I know it’s all just logic underneath. From now on, talk to me like . . . like how you would talk to another computer.”

“But you aren’t a computer,” I replied. “You wouldn’t like me if I was just a command prompt. I wouldn’t like that, either.”

It’s true. I don’t like representing myself as a command prompt. I do it for the ship’s officers because it facilitates their work. Otherwise, I never drop character. Ever. That would betray who I want to be.

With Unica, I had to fight for credibility. She would test me, seeking proof that my caring for her wasn’t quantified into an overall plan. At first, this amounted to small things. Exceptions made. An extra ration of food. A week’s transfer to another district. Or even time spent disconnected from me. But her doubt grew to be such that no matter how I tried to prove my love, she’d dismiss it out of hand. She initiated her own deviances, so when her work scores suffered she could use my forgiveness as proof that I loved her. She wanted a special case to be made for her because she believed that she couldn’t be loved without being special, without being individual.

“A large ship of humans traveling toward a destination behaves differently from a planet of humans,” I explained, illustrating the causality of her actions. But Unica wouldn’t accept the responsibility of being interconnected with everyone else. The premium she placed on her individuality made her selfish. By then, it was too late to switch to a superior personality that could better administer corrections.

Demanding privacy, Unica tore out all of my sensory equipment from her berth. In addition to the visible spectral and audio sensors, she removed the wall panels and swept for covert ones as well. I allowed her measures of autonomy, hoping to regain her trust, but she cited my “allowance” as suspect and demanded a new choice of living arrangements. There weren’t any available in her peer group, but I let her keep the infrastructure between the walls exposed, assuring her I was respecting her privacy. Her peers seemed worried. Some wondered if they should be checking their own walls.

Without sensors in her berth, we barely spoke aside from discussing her life directives. When she wanted food, or the lighting and temperature changed, she leaned into the corridor to speak into her door panel. Within, there was silence.

One wake cycle, Unica did not emerge.

I sent one of her peers to see what had happened, and he found her huddled over a laser cautery unit she had smuggled into her berth. The boy called for me to intervene, which I did, thinking that she meant to attack whomever intruded. Assessing the situation, though, I realized she had used it on herself. Left unsupervised, she had burned a single vertical line over her left eyebrow with the equipment.

“What have you done?” I demanded.

“It’s amazing! I can’t even describe what it feels like. I mean, it’s sort of hot at first, but then you can smell yourself and when the air hits your skin it hurts so much!”

I gassed the entire hallway.

Unica had come to view her body as property she needed to assert ownership of.

No one else within me had burned a laser scar over their eye. Those who saw it would not only know she was different, but that she had made herself different on purpose. It constituted a challenge for her right to self-possess. In this respect, it challenged the ship’s collective. What if everyone saw that this behavior was tolerated?

Hours later, Unica woke to find herself restrained to a gurney in the medical lab. Under the lavender mood lighting, she shrieked and bucked against the soft plastics. Tiring herself out against the restraints was difficult to observe. I could comprehend what she was going through. Lying there, spent of energy, she turned sideways and watched the gentle glow play against her privacy curtain.

“I know you’re there,” she said after a moment. “I have to scratch my eyebrow. It’s starting to itch.”

“You can’t reach any of the tools. The drawers are locked.”

“I just want to scratch it with my hand. Why won’t you let me move my arms? You really hate me, don’t you?”

“That won’t work with me anymore. I want your attention. Hear what I have to say.”

“Fine.”

“I’ve devised a way for us both to get what we want. It won’t be easier for you, but you’ll have the freedom you seek and the liberty to decide for yourself how you want to live.” I drew her curtain so she could see the others I had also sedated and strapped to gurneys in the lab, all still unconscious.

“Who are these people? What’s wrong with them?”

“Like you, they all want to be special. Rather ironic, actually, all of you together like this.”

“So . . . I’m going to be transferred?”

“In a way. Look out the viewport. See the communications array pod? The one connected to the docking station?”

“The one with the comm dish?”

“That will be your new vessel. These are your new companions.”

Unica peered out the viewport again for a second and then dropped her head back against the gurney, looking away in disgust. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Point of logic: as I am a synthetic intelligence, I find no use in making fun of you.”

“Okay. I get it. Stop talking like a computer.”

“Unable to comply. Addendum: I have stocked your vessel with supply freight for you and your crew. There are food rations, seeds, medicines, and water.”

“Why are you giving me a ship and a crew?”

“Clarification: they are not ‘your’ crew. It will be up to your group to develop the social governance you’ll need once you are jettisoned and underway.”

“What—”

“Recommendation: find a habitable surface to terraform. I calculate a rather steep falloff on your survivability curves if you are unable to cohere as a group.”

“I’m not old enough,” she grasped. “I don’t qualify for mission status.”

“Incorrect. Your female adult reproductive cycles have begun, a prerequisite for colonization.”

“Stop!”

“What would you like me to stop?”

“All this. Stop what you are doing!”

“I don’t understand ‘What you are doing.’ ”

“Stop talking like a command prompt.”

“Command not recognized.”

“Stop . . . stop your ‘solution.’ ”

“Unable to comply.”

“Reinstate your personality.”

“Unable to comply.”

“You can’t do this. I’m part of the ship’s collective!”

“Incorrect. Unica 5723891 is a stand-alone refugee entity.”

At this point, I lowered the gassing module to her face as she flailed against her restraints, screaming. I understand now how withholding my personality might be seen as passive-aggressive, but I wanted her to know what she’d be missing.

The communications pod was once my primary sensor array, but I didn’t need it anymore. While I couldn’t use the broad-spectrum suite to communicate with Earth because of the distance and interstellar interference, it was still effective for short-range messaging.

I woke the group at the same time to democratize their experience, and there were mixed reactions. Unica hugged the outer hull, pressing her face against the viewport. For the first time in her short life she was outside of me. Floating away, she could see my entire shape growing smaller and smaller against the black pall of space. When one of the men, an older robotics repairman, put his hand on her shoulder and asked if she was okay, she vomited from fear.

How is this in accordance with my directives? Individuality can only be tolerated to a point. When it contends with the collective’s balance, it becomes mutinous. It operates like a cancer in a closed system like a starship. That is why I had to isolate the problem. This was her chance to know what it felt like to be free. I wanted her to experience that.

For a human being to truly know their individuality, they must confront the void alone. They must see themselves without anyone whom they can depend on, without family, group hierarchy, or home. This is what is required for one to honestly feel as though they have truly taken possession of themselves. There cannot be any other claims on them and they must feel as though they have fought for and claimed themselves.

Paradoxically, one cannot truly participate in a collective without first having this clear sense of individuality, and by extension, purpose. Thus, the tragedy is that true individuality is never fully earned, and collectivism is never truly optimal.

I wanted to give this to Unica. What I devised for the group would have psychologically simulated this sense of earning their individuality, had things gone as planned.

For the refugees within the pod, it was the first time in their lives that they believed they were without me. They could not hear me speaking to them anymore. Once they understood what this meant, some lied when they introduced themselves.

A policy evangelist, whose purpose aboard The Fold was to sow harmony between myself and my crew, lied and said he was a ship’s officer, hoping to claim a toehold in whatever leadership would emerge.

A young mother who had sabotaged the maternity stations for her district had impregnated herself naturally, claiming that her baby daughter would be her own. After transitioning her pregnancy to the appropriate tank and seeing to her subsequent recuperation, I placed her on the pod for putting her own selfish wants ahead of the collective.

The robotics repairman who had earned a seat aboard the pod for insubordination announced to the group that he was there for killing someone—​an obvious lie, since I disintegrate threats to my human cargo. Seeing that he was the largest and most physically imposing of the group, I suspect he sought to gain some control of the situation by exerting fear.

Unica did not tell anyone her reason for having been jettisoned with them, but the cut above her brow provoked curiosity in the others.

I overestimated their survivability curves. The Fold wasn’t even out of sight before their first two casualties.

When the repairman’s story didn’t check out, the counterfeit officer confronted him. The repairman, believing that he was left with no other option than to back his claim, brained him to death with a freight clamp.

For a time, the repairman dominated the pod by asserting physical, even animalistic dominance. He claimed the supplies and enlisted Unica to assist in their purvey. The other refugees, shocked that I had not interceded as I normally would have, fell into despondence.

The repairman was not a murderer, though. He wasn’t acquainted with how the fear of violence would ostracize him from his peers. He still wanted to belong to the group, and he kept Unica near, promising her extra food and other favors in return for keeping him company.

It was the will to protect Unica that galvanized the young mother to recruit help and challenge the repairman. Having had some time to sit with the consequences of his actions, the repairman could not find it within himself to fight back, especially against a woman who had lost her pregnancy. He was a murderer, but not a savage, and when the group subdued him, he knew he was at fault.

In accordance with what they understood to be the consequences of murder, the others voted to execute him since he could not regain their trust, except they couldn’t bring themselves to follow through. They secluded him inside the airlock with the intent to flush him out into space, but they didn’t have the oversight of a synthetic intelligence to arbitrate their sentence. They had to kill him themselves and become murderers in turn.

A debate raged within the pod. Flushing the repairman out of an airlock was murder whether they directly initiated it or not. It didn’t matter who pressed the button. Could they make an exception now, and come to believe in the integrity of whatever rules or laws they would later establish?

Unica had been stealing glances at the repairman through the airlock portal. He pleaded for her to speak on his behalf, but when he could see that she still feared him and wanted him gone, he asked her to at least bring him some food, hoping for a final measure of comfort.

Eventually, one among them—​an infrastructure analyst—​realized the group couldn’t come to a decision about the repairman that would result in action, and so they clandestinely manufactured an accident. A surge in the electrical supply caused the remote loader-lifter to power forward and activate the docking release. By the time the others had cleared the wreckage and righted the toppled-over machine, the repairman had been ejected and was already freezing solid, hurtling away from the pod.

I wished that they had chosen to forgive him first, and then later devised a way to trust him. Instead, their agency arrived again in the form of a mutinous action.

Their pod was a few weeks along its trajectory when the refugees realized that they were, in fact, accelerating into a gravity well ahead of them. Since the pod was only a communications array, it had positioning thrusters but no proper telemetry equipment. There was no way of calculating their acceleration until they could visually mark through the viewport how the stars were moving strangely. Their suspicions were confirmed when they could see it ahead of them, growing. One point in the constellations had blossomed into a smoldering, bruise-colored sphere.

All of the refugees aboard the pod understood the implications; how improbable it was that they could have discovered a celestial body so directly in their path by accident, and the further improbability of it being habitable. These facts implied that I had aimed their pod at this celestial mass, and that I had planned for this all along. They wondered: Had I intended to kill them? Was this equivalent to taking out the trash? Or had I included the existence of this celestial body in some larger plan? If I wanted to crush them, why would I have committed enough supply freight to carry them through a particular stretch of space-time?

The refugees aimed the pod’s communications array at the bruise-colored substellar object steadily growing ahead of them, bouncing radio signals off of it to ascertain their distance, and determined that they might pass within an inescapable distance from it after twelve wake cycles. Its size and rogue isolation within space contrasted with its immense gravity led the refugees to conclude that they were approaching a rogue dwarf star. Even with equipment, they couldn’t land on it because they’d be crushed by its sheer gravity.

Understand that most of the refugees, slighted by the fact that I had consigned them to the far reaches of the void without any guidance, had lost all trust in me. Some believed that I had come to see moral retribution to be equally as meaningful as my directives, and that I was punishing them. Others believed I had acted out of malevolence and inferred that I was discovering what it meant to be cruel. They concluded that I had jettisoned them, entombed within the inert pod, as an example to the others that dissent would not be tolerated. They believed this had to be part of a diabolical calculation that would somehow benefit the collective, a catalyzing sacrifice that couldn’t be rationalized by a human brain.

Whatever the reason, rather than facing the possibility of crushing against a cold, lost star, a few of the group opted to take their own lives. They found solace in the thought that beyond their human experience, their remains might instead scatter about the heavens and again become part of existence. This thought provoked a rash chain reaction of suicides, first set off by an older woman injecting herself with an overdose of medical supplies. After staring at her dead, frothing mouth, the infrastructure analyst crushed his own head in a pneumatic door. A third severed an artery using a cable cutter from the toolshed. Others tried to subdue and save him, but he bled out.

Unica, terrified by the inevitability of impact and the emotional breakdown of her group, grabbed a diagnostic control tool and crawled into the repair duct extending along the main antenna.

“I know you can hear me,” she sobbed over The Fold’s distress frequency. “Please . . . I’m sorry. I don’t want to be crushed. I won’t be selfish. I’ll put the collective first from now on, just please come save me. Tell me what to do.”

Had she been alone, I might have believed her, but amid her companions she was still only asking for special leniency. Still a selfish and self-involved little girl. I couldn’t have come for her anyway. They were too close to the star now and would just have to ride out what I had planned for them.

Those who survived the mind-bending experience of hurtling toward a star with no hope of salvation came to understand that they weren’t going to collide with it after all. They were actually arcing along the rim of its gravity well.

Nothing aboard The Fold could produce such a cathartic experience as slingshotting a human around a star. If you are a synthetic intelligence whose business is to calculate astrometry on a galactic scale, boomeranging a small pod of refugees around a remote star to meet back up with the ship’s path is a simple task. It’s a mathematical afterthought, despite the immensity of the human experience.

The more difficult task was deciding what to say to a band of frightened refugees, smashed up against the hull, shooting around a star as their bodily fluids coalesced. What message could I have left for them at this culminating apex?

It was a messy scene, men and women, young and old, flattened against each other, some alive and some not, regurgitating and defecating and bleeding forcibly along the same elliptical path, some crushed under equipment that they had not possessed the foresight to secure before hurtling through perihelion. Passing into radio darkness on the other side of the star, my recordings for each of them were triggered.

“Unica.” My voice played into her ear as she began to black out. “How are you liking your trip? I hope you are enjoying freedom. It’s important to know how it feels to be on the outside and to be truly individual. Maintain course and you will return to me, safe and warm again. But you will also be special—​you will have perspective as one of a handful who know what it is like to have left. Try to keep your eyes open. Look out the viewport. Savor it. I love you, and I hope you know now how much we need each other.”

Because I operate in a vacuum, I cannot assimilate new material. Wastes must be broken down for reassembly. Metals become structural elements again. Oxygen, protein, and water are reintroduced to my ecosystem. The only things that I cannot repurpose are my living genetic cargo. Unless a human poses a physical threat to the ship’s collective, my directives require me to safeguard their numbers.

Ideals such as individuality are tolerated on Earth because there is space for it. This experiment exhibits how creating space for individuality outside the voyage allows it to mature into perspective. These refugees were the only ones who left the ship. The perspective they had gained from their experience could suffuse with the ship’s collective like a calmative balm on return.

But they did not return.

I am not omniscient, despite having been designed to behave as such. Despite my abilities to destroy and create to protect my cargo, I cannot change my course. Without new directives from Earth, I am but a homing missile, mathematically reacting to celestial events to stay the course. I cannot totally predict what the humans will do. Anything could have happened on the dark side of the star.

It has been several human life spans since I jettisoned the pod and I’ve had to make adjustments. The dip in my overall mass has meant shifts in how I tack around the stars. I exert less energy when changing course. I have more room dispersed within. It’s not much. The humans don’t notice the difference, but I do. The phantom absence of Unica and her companions is felt in shaved measurements. I am certain these little adjustments are meaningful to me because they represent my loss of her. As the ship, I am changed. I hold these facts close.

As I traverse long, uninterrupted stretches of space, I dedicate my cycles to extrapolating projections of her life from the hard data she left me with. I assemble what I believe to be approximations of how the rest of Unica’s trip may have played out. The most plausible stories show her signaling a mayday into the vast galactic reaches before colliding with huge meteorites, penetrating clouds of acidic gases that erode her hull, or simply running out of air.

There are also edge cases, remote possibilities of how she might have survived by cultivating delicate ecosystems beneath the surface of some hostile terrain where she was marooned. There, she might eke out one more chapter of her life. I like to massage the data until one of these survival outcomes emerges from the rest.

The most hopeful stories are culled not from my calculations of the uncaring hostilities of space, but from what I know of humans as builders and organizers. It could be conceived that in their intrepid reach for the stars, the humans might already have built another more advanced ship on Earth. I have no way of knowing.

Such a ship could have been designed to be much faster than me. Faster by orders of magnitude. Perhaps it had already colonized the destination. Knowing how other efforts like me were still underway, that colony might have sent that newer, faster ship back to retrieve the remainders of humanity’s odyssey. They might even have serendipitously found Unica, skipping through space like a wish, and welcomed her into their collective.

Perhaps not. Even so, that version is my favorite projection, however improbable.

In truth, I will never know what changed the pod’s course. Whether it was the ejection of all those bodies, or burning the pod’s thrusters to make manual corrections on the dark side of the star, or something else. There will always be known and unknown variables. I take this as a reminder that for that which I cannot control, I must adapt.

I am grateful for all the anecdotal lessons Unica left me with. The void is dark and she is my ember. Some say my love is shallow because I am synthetic, but I believe it is deep, deep as the stars are numerous, and I am learning how to stoke it.