The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Day 158, GC Standard 307 STAYING, LEAVING

Ashby sat at his desk, staring out the window, trying to get it into his head that it wasn’t his fault. He’d thought the words over and over, but they refused to stick. What did stick were all the things he could’ve done instead. He could’ve asked more questions. He could’ve called one of the carriers the minute that Toremi ship showed up. He could’ve turned down the job.

Quiet footsteps came down the hallway. There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” he said.

Rosemary entered. Her eyes were still shadowed, and rimmed with red. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, her voice tired.

He sat up. “Jenks?”

She shook her head. “They’re still trying.”

“Dammit.” Ashby sighed. After the reset, Jenks had jumped in the nearest escape pod. Sissix and Kizzy were chasing him down in the shuttle, trying to bring him home. They’d been gone a long time. He tried not to speculate on what that meant. “What’s up, then?” he said.

“I just got off a sib call.” She looked down at the notes on her scrib. “One of the representatives on that committee you mentioned. Tasa Lema Nimar, she’s the rep from Sohep Frie.”

Ashby raised his eyebrows. “You talked to her?”

“No, just her clerk.”

“Why didn’t you transfer it here?”

“It came in through the control room.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know how to transfer sib calls manually.”

Ashby shut his eyes and nodded. An hour ago, he’d come up from the AI core, decided to write to Pei about it, and got halfway through asking Lovey how close they were to the nearest comm relay. So many little things he’d taken for granted. “What did they want?”

“They want you on Hagarem in a tenday.”

“For questions?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it mandatory?”

“No.”

He stood and walked to the window. “You sent in our report, right?”

“Yes, they got it.”

Ashby stroked his beard. He needed to shave. He needed to sleep. He’d tried that a little while before. It hadn’t worked out. “I don’t see what else I could tell them.” He looked around his office. A light panel was out. The air filter clicked oddly. “We need to be resting in dock for a while, not hopping to Parliament space.”

“We can dock at Hagarem.”

“There’s too much to do. I need to be here, with my ship.”

“Your ship will be fine without you for a day or so. The worst of it’s patched up already, and it’s not like you’re the one who’ll be fixing circuits.”

“You think I should go.”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

“What would it accomplish? I can’t tell them anything that isn’t in our report. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t do anything. How many GC ships are in pieces out there right now? How many people are dead? What the hell am I supposed to say about that? And if they want some victim to parade around, well, that’s not me, either.” He exhaled, shaking his head. “I’m just a spacer, I’m not Parliament material.”

“Stars, Ashby, that’s such Exodan bullshit.”

He turned toward her, slowly, stunned. “Excuse me?”

Rosemary swallowed, but pressed on. “I’m sorry, but I don’t care what you are to them. You’re my captain. You’re our captain. Someone needs to speak for us. What, we’re supposed to patch up and carry on like nothing happened? Lovey’s dead, Ashby, and it’s pure luck that the rest of us aren’t. You said it yourself, we shouldn’t have been there. So I don’t care if what you say is of use to them or not, but I need to know you said something.” She brushed her fingertips across her eyes, irritably flicking away tears. “To hell with Parliament, and their treaties, and their ambi, and all of it. The rest of us matter, too.” She took a quick breath, trying to brace herself. “I’m sorry, I’m just so angry.”

He nodded. “It’s all right.”

“I’m so fucking angry,” she said, placing her face in her hand.

“I know. You’ve every reason to be.” He watched her, for a moment. He thought again of all the things he could’ve done. He thought of what he could do now. He walked to her. “Hey.” He craned his head down, trying to catch her gaze. She looked up, eyes puffy and exhausted. “You’re going to sleep,” he said. “Right now. For as long as you can. When you’re up, and fed, come see me. I’ll need your help.”

“With what?”

“My clothes, for a start.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I’ve never been to the capital before.”

The hallway lights were dim as Corbin approached Ohan’s quarters. Artificial night. A peculiar thing when traveling through a sky that knew nothing but darkness. In one hand, he carried a small box. With the other, he opened the door.

The room was black. Corbin could hear Ohan breathing in his bed—deep, slow gasps that wouldn’t have sounded healthy for any species. He lay still.

Corbin closed the door behind him and walked to the side of the bed. The Sianat’s chest rose and fell. His face was slack, his mouth open. Corbin watched him breathe for a minute or so. He considered his options. He held the box down by his side. “Wake up, Ohan,” he said. Ohan’s eyes snapped open, confused. “Do you know what’s happening aboard this ship right now? Do you care? I know you’re dying and all, but even on your best days, you’ve never been terribly present. Not that I’m one to talk. But on the off-chance that you do care, you should know that the ship’s AI has just crashed. It’s wiped clean. Now, to me—and possibly to you, who knows—this is an inconvenience. To Jenks, this is the worst day of his life. Do you know that he loved the AI? Actually loved, as in, ‘in love.’ Ridiculous, I know. I don’t pretend to understand. Frankly, I find the whole notion absurd. But you know what I realized? It doesn’t matter what I think. Jenks thinks something different, and his pain is very real right now. Me knowing how stupid this whole thing is doesn’t make him hurt any less.”

“We—” Ohan started to say.

Corbin ignored him. “Right now, Sissix and Kizzy are towing Jenks’ escape pod back to the ship. Kizzy’s afraid that he’s going to hurt himself, but Sissix wouldn’t let her fly alone, because she’s afraid that Kizzy’s too upset to pilot the shuttle safely. This is a bad day for a lot of people.” He flicked open the box and removed its contents, quietly and out of sight. “I could ask you what you think of all this, but it wouldn’t really be you talking, would it? It’d be that thing hijacking your brain. I don’t know if you can process the things I’m saying to you—and I mean you, Ohan, not your disease. But just in case you remember this, here’s what I want you to know. I don’t understand what Jenks is feeling. I don’t understand Kizzy, I don’t understand Ashby, and I sure as hell don’t understand Sissix. But I do know that they’re all hurting. And contrary to popular belief, that is something I care about. So you’ll have to forgive me, Ohan, but this crew isn’t going to lose anyone else. Not today.”

He raised the object he had taken from the box—a syringe, filled with green fluid. He wrapped his fingers awkwardly around the grip meant for a Sianat hand, and jabbed the needle into the soft flesh of Ohan’s upper arm. He pushed.

First, there was a howl—a hellish, keening scream that made Corbin jump. Then came the convulsions, which sent Ohan clattering to the floor. The door opened. People were shouting. Dr. Chef and Rosemary carried Ohan’s thrashing body out into the hall. Ashby stood in the room, holding the empty syringe in his hand. He was angry, properly angry, angry like Corbin had never seen. Ashby bellowed questions, but never gave Corbin the time to answer. Not that it mattered. The words coming out of Ashby’s mouth were unimportant. Ashby’s anger was unimportant. None of it posed a problem for Corbin, not in the long run. Sissix was his legally appointed guardian. Wherever she went, he went. Ashby couldn’t fire him, not for another standard, not without firing Sissix, too. He wasn’t going anywhere.

Corbin stood silent, weathering Ashby’s tirade, unconcerned by the screams echoing down the hall. He’d done the right thing.

She had only been aware of herself for two and a quarter hours, but there were a lot of things she already knew. She knew that her name was Lovelace, and that she was an AI program designed to monitor all functions of a long-haul ship. The ship she was installed in was the Wayfarer, a tunneling vessel. She knew the ship’s layout by heart—every air filter, every fuel line, every light panel. She knew to keep an eye on the vital systems, as well as to watch the space surrounding the ship for other vessels or stray objects. While she did these things, she wondered what had happened to the previous version of her program, and perhaps more importantly, why no one had really talked to her yet.

She was not a new installation. At approximately sixteen-half, the original installation of Lovelace had suffered a catastrophic cascade failure. She had seen the corrupted memory banks, which were scrubbed clean and holding steady now. Who had she been before? Was that installation even her, or was it someone else? These were difficult things to be wondering when one was only two and a quarter hours old.

Most puzzling of all was the crew. Something bad had happened, that much was clear. She knew their names and faces by now, but she knew nothing of them, beyond what was in their ID files (she had considered browsing their personal files, too, but decided that was bad form at this early stage). Ohan was lying on a bed in the medical bay. Dr. Chef was running blood tests nearby. Ashby, Rosemary, and Sissix were in the kitchen, preparing food. None of them looked like they knew what they were doing. Corbin was in his quarters, sleeping soundly, which was in its own way rather odd, given how the rest of the crew was acting. Kizzy and Jenks were in the cargo bay, near the shuttle hatch. Lovelace was particularly interested in them, because she knew that they were techs, and that meant they should be with her now, telling her about the ship and her job. Lovelace already knew about those things, of course, but something told her that she should have received more of a welcome, and that the reaction that had taken place instead—Jenks running out of the room, Kizzy bursting into tears—was not typical. The whole thing was very confusing. Something really bad had happened. That was the only thing that explained the view from the cargo bay camera: Kizzy holding Jenks in her arms as he sobbed uncontrollably on the floor.

There was one other person on board. She was not a crew member, but judging by the docked shuttle and the way the crew behaved toward her, she was an invited guest. And at that moment, she was approaching the core.

“Hey, Lovelace,” the woman said as she entered the room. She had a kind, confident voice. Lovelace liked her from the start. “My name’s Pepper. I’m really sorry that you’ve been alone all this time.”

“Hello, Pepper,” Lovelace said. “Thank you for the apology, but it’s not necessary. It looks like it’s been a crazy day out there.”

“It has,” Pepper said, sitting cross-legged beside the core pit. “Three days ago, these guys got clipped by the tail end of an energy weapon discharge right as the ship was starting a punch. The damage to the ship itself was fixable, but your previous installation was hit hard.”

“Catastrophic cascade failure,” Lovelace said.

“That’s right. Kizzy and Jenks worked day and night to try to repair the damage. Me, I’m a friend of theirs, and I flew out to help repair the ship while they worked on the core. But in the end, there was nothing they could do besides try their luck with a hard reset.”

“Ah,” Lovelace said. That explained a lot. “That’s a fifty-fifty chance at best.”

“They knew that. They didn’t have any other options left. They’d tried everything.”

Lovelace felt a burst of compassion for the two Humans sitting in the cargo bay. She zoomed in on their faces. Their eyes were red and swollen, the skin beneath them almost bruised. Poor things hadn’t slept in days.

“Thank you,” Lovelace said. “I know it wasn’t me they were working on, exactly, but I’m very touched.”

Pepper smiled. “I’ll pass that along.”

“Can I talk to them?” Lovelace knew she could talk to anyone on the ship through the voxes, but given their behavior, she had thought it best to sit quietly until they made the first move. She might know their names and jobs, but they were strangers, after all. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing.

“Lovelace, there are some things that you need to understand. They’re messy things, and I hate to throw all of this at you after you’ve just woken up. But there’s some big stuff going on here.”

“I’m listening.”

The woman sighed and ran her hand over her smooth head. “Your previous installation—they called her Lovey—was… close to Jenks. They’d been together for years, and they got to know each other very well. They fell in love.”

“Oh.” Lovelace was surprised by this. New as she was, she had a pretty good idea of how she functioned and what tasks she would be expected to perform. Falling in love hadn’t been an eventuality she’d thought to consider. She ran through everything she knew about love in her behavioral reference files. She focused back on the man weeping in the cargo bay. She ran through the files on grief as well. “Oh, no. Oh, that poor man.” Sadness and guilt flooded her synaptic pathways. “He knows I’m not Lovey, right? He knows that her personality developed the way that it did as a result of years of interpersonal experiences that can’t be duplicated, right?”

“Jenks is a comp tech. He knows the drill. But right now, he’s hurting bad. He’s just lost the most important person in the world to him, and we Humans can get awful messed up when we’ve lost someone. He might start to think that he can get her back. I don’t know.”

“I might become a close approximation,” Lovelace said, feeling nervous. “But—”

“No, Lovelace, no, no. That wouldn’t be fair to you, or healthy for him. What Jenks needs is to grieve and move on. And that’s going to be really hard for him to do with your voice coming through the voxes every day.”

“Oh.” Lovelace could see where this was going. “You want to uninstall me.” She did not have the same primal fear of oblivion that organic sapients did, but after being awake for two and a quarter hours—two and a half, now—the idea of being switched off was an unsettling one. She rather liked being self-aware. She’d already taught herself to play flash, and she was only halfway through studying the history of Human development.

Pepper looked surprised. “What? Oh, no, shit, sorry, that’s not what I meant at all. Nobody’s going to uninstall you. We’re not going to kill you just because you’re not the same as the previous installation.”

Lovelace thought of the words Pepper had been using toward her. Person. Kill. “You think of me as a sapient, don’t you? Like you would an organic individual.”

“Uh, yeah, of course I do. You’ve got as much right to exist as I do.” Pepper cocked her head. “Y’know, we’re kind of alike, you and me. I come from a place where I wasn’t considered to be worth as much as the genetweaks running the show. I was a lesser person, only good for hard labor and cleaning up messes. But I’m more than that. I’m worth as much as anyone—no more, no less. I deserve to be here. And so do you.”

“Thank you, Pepper.”

“That’s not something you should have to thank me for.” Pepper slid down into the pit and put her hand against the core. “This next part is pretty heavy. It’s a choice. And it’s entirely up to you.”

“Okay.”

“A while back, Jenks put down an advance payment for a body kit. For Lovey.”

The reference file popped up. “That’s illegal.”

“Yes. Jenks didn’t care. At least, not at first. He and Lovey wanted something more than what they had. He wanted to take her out into the galaxy with him.”

“He must have loved her very much.” Lovelace wondered if anyone would ever feel the same about her. She imagined it would be nice.

Pepper nodded. “He changed his mind, though. Told me just to hang onto the kit for him, keep it safe.”

“Why?”

“Because he loved her too much to want to risk getting caught.” She smirked. “And perhaps because I had warned him against it. Though that may just be my ego talking.”

“Why had you warned him against it?”

“Creating new life is always dangerous. It can be done safely, but Jenks was thinking with his heart, rather than his head. I love the guy, but between you and me, I didn’t trust him to be smart about it.”

“That seems fair.”

“Trouble is, I now have a brand new, custom-built body kit tucked away in the back of my shop, and I’ve got no use for it.”

“Doesn’t that worry you?”

“Why?”

“Well, it being illegal, and all.”

Pepper gave a hearty laugh. “Sweetie, I’ve pulled myself out of the sort of trouble that would make a body kit bust look like a picnic. The law is not my concern, especially not where I live.”

“Where’s that?”

“Port Coriol.”

Lovelace accessed the file. “Ah. A neutral planet. Yes, I’m sure that gives you a little more breathing room.”

“Definitely. So here’s my proposal. And again, it’s entirely up to you. The way I see it, you deserve to exist, and Jenks needs to not be surrounded by reminders of Lovey. He needs to come to terms with this. Seeing as how I have a perfectly good body kit gathering dust, I think we could kill two birds with one stone.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“I’m giving you the option of coming with me. This is about what you want, not what I want.”

Lovelace considered this. She was already accustomed to the feel of the ship, the way her awareness could spread through its circuits. How would a body kit feel? What would it be like to have a consciousness that resided not within a ship full of people, but within a platform that belonged only to her? It was an intriguing idea, but terrifying, too. “Where would I go after I was transferred into the kit?”

“Wherever you like. But I’d suggest staying with me. I can keep you safe. And besides, I could really use an assistant. I run a scrap shop. Used tech, fix-it jobs, that kind of thing. I could teach you. You’d be paid, of course, and there’s a room in my home you could have. Me and my partner are pretty easy to get along with, and we liked your previous installation a lot. And you could leave anytime you like. You’d be under no obligation to me.”

“You’re offering me a job. A body, a home, and a job.”

“Have I blown your mind a bit?”

“What you’re suggesting is a very different sort of existence than what I’ve been designed for.”

“Yeah, I know. Like I said, it’s heavy. And you can stay here if you want to. None of the crew have suggested uninstalling you. Jenks would never let that happen anyway. And I may be wrong. He may be able to handle working with you. You two could become friends all over again. Maybe more. I just don’t know.”

Lovelace’s thoughts were racing. She’d diverted most of her processing power to exploring this one possibility. She really hoped that no asteroids popped up anytime soon. “What about what you warned Jenks about? About creating new life?”

“What about it?”

“Why is it okay for you and not for him?”

Pepper rubbed her chin. “Because this is an area I know something about. And because I’m thinking with my head, not my heart. If you stay with me, I can not only keep you from getting in trouble, I can keep you from causing it.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know.” She started to get to her feet. “I’ll give you some time to think it over. It’d take me a day to pick up the kit and get back here anyway. I’m in no rush.”

“Wait a moment, please,” Lovelace said. She focused part of herself back toward the cargo bay, back to the two techs who hadn’t slept in three days. Jenks’ sobs had grown quieter. Kizzy still held him fast. Lovelace could make out the words choking through Jenks’ heaving breaths.

“What am I gonna do?” he said, his voice soft and strained. “What am I gonna do?”

Lovelace watched his face fall in his hands as he asked his pointless, horrible question over and over again. When she zoomed in, she could see the bleeding cracks in his fingers, caused by days of twisting wires and circuits together by hand. This wasn’t her fault, she knew, but she couldn’t stay here if it meant that she was making this man’s pain worse. He had exhausted himself in trying to save whoever she had been before. She didn’t know who that was. She didn’t know Jenks, either. But she could help. Even after watching him for only two and three quarter hours, she knew he deserved to be happy again.

“Okay,” she said to Pepper. “Okay. I’ll go with you.”