<You think she’s as old as you are. She’s not. She’s at least three times as old.>
<That’s interesting. Does that matter, though? Ngoba Starl seemed to trust her. He’s the one that got you away from Heartbridge.> It was interesting, but not terribly. In the grand scheme of things anything under two-hundred was still young.
<Hari Jickson saved me from Heartbridge. He’s dead now.>
<Yes, he is,> Andy said.
<There’s another man I remember. He was there with Hari Jickson.>
<Where was there?>
<The place where we were seeds.>
<And who was there with you?> Andy asked, taking care to keep any impatience he felt from his mental tone.
<His name was Cal Kraft.>
Andy remembered the name. Petral had pointed the blonde man out to him at Ngoba Starl’s club before the fighting started. <I saw him on Cruithne with Riggs Zanda.>
<You killed Riggs Zanda.>
<I’d prefer to think he killed himself.>
<I think I’ve killed people.>
<You did?>
Lyssa fell silent. Andy looked around the command center at the various displays showing the sections of the ship functioning as they were meant to; something he still wasn’t used to. He kept thinking the sensor systems had to be malfunctioning. The two weeks since they had left Cruithne had been like lowering himself into hot water, learning to trust his ship again.
The comms screen where Cara had been talking to the Port Authority lieutenant still showed the Mars 1 governmental seal, shifting between red and green.
He waited another minute for Lyssa to answer. He was uncertain how to help or what she even needed. Was it a mistake to think the AI needed anything?
Andy left the room for his quarters, feeling like he was forgetting something important.
CHAPTER SIX
STELLAR DATE: 09.13.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Mars 1 Ring, Mars Protectorate, InnerSol
Cara found Tim in the day room. He was sitting with his back against the base of the couch, nose in his book of The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, running a finger along the lines as he read. Three rows of carefully arranged toy ships sat on the floor in front of him. Cara stood in the doorway, studying the ships; they were sorted by size and color. Tim had only recently started becoming fastidious with the things he did: lining up his toys, eating his food in a specific order, insisting on wearing the same clothes for days at a time, brushing his teeth so long she thought his gums would bleed. She frowned as she watched him, feeling like—along with all the other subtle changes in her life—something else had crept up on her. While she had been focused on the adults, Tim had changed. Something about him reminded Cara of their mom: he was becoming brittle, unreasonable.
“Tim,” she called. “Dad wants you to get ready. You’re going off-ship to the port.”
He didn’t look up immediately. His finger continued following the last four lines of the poem he was reading. Only when he was done did he look up from the book.
“What are we going to do?”
“Buy supplies, I guess. Dad said he wants you to go with him.”
“Just me? What about you?”
“I’m going with Petral. She has to run some errands, too.”
“Why can’t I go with Petral?”
Cara shrugged. “Because Dad said you were going with him. I don’t know.”
He slammed the book closed. “I don’t want to go with Dad. You go with Dad and I’ll go with Petral.”
“You can talk to Dad about that. I thought you’d want to tell him what we’d like to eat for the next six months. You know he’s going to get food, too, right? If you’re there to tell him what you want, you’ll get to choose what flavor juice we get.”
“Why don’t we just get a dispenser like every other ship so we can have different flavors?”
“It’s been broken. I don’t think Fran has gotten around to working on it. It’s not too high on her list of priorities.”
“It should be. I hate just one flavor of juice.”
“There are worse things in the world than one flavor of juice.”
“Yeah,” Tim said. “Having two flavors, water and grape, or water and cherry, like Dad says. Or three flavors: water, punch, and nothing.”
Cara smiled. That was one of Dad’s favorite jokes: contrasting whatever they had with not having it at all.
“Come on,” she said. “If we hurry up, we can ride Alice down to the airlock.”
“Is Fran coming with us?”
“I don’t think so. I think she’s staying here.”
He stood and stretched, his arms looking thin to her. He arched his back as he twisted his fists before letting his arms slap at his sides. He stepped carefully over the lines of ships.
“You should pick those up,” Cara said. “If Dad steps on them they’re going to get broken and you’ll get in trouble.”
“They’re ready for the next drone attack.”
“I don’t think those are going to do much against drones.”
Tim gave her an exasperated look. “Those aren’t real ships, dummy. It’s strategy. I’m setting everything up just like Dad does in the holodisplay. This is defense in depth along an established line.”
“If you’re going to try and act like you know anything about space battles, then you ought to also know the ships are all too close together.”
“It’s representative, Cara. You aren’t smart enough to know how to abstract things.”
“The kid who talks in baby-talk is going to say he’s smarter than me.”
“I am smarter than you.”
“Pick up your toys, then you can try to prove it.”
Tim narrowed his eyes and she wondered if she’d pushed him too far. If he fell into another screaming fit, Dad would be at the door wanting to know what was wrong and what she’d done to Tim.
Cara shook her head. “I’ll help you,” she said. “We need to hurry up.”
“I don’t know where the box went.”
Cara came around the couch and pointed at the floor near the vid display. “It’s right there.” She went to her knees on the opposite side of the defensive line from him and started gathering the ships.
Tim protested then squatted down to start grabbing ships before she could toss them in the box. He made a show of arranging each one properly. When the box was full, he clicked the lid in place and nodded.
“Dry dock,” he said. “Hey, Cara?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think Mom’s coming back?” He didn’t look at her as he picked up the next ship.
Cara had been about to push herself to her feet. She rested back on her heels and put her hands on her knees. “Why are you asking that?”
Tim looked at the floor and shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s weird, isn’t it? That she’s not going to come back. It seems like she should come back.”
Cara let her gaze fall to the floor as well. She looked at the couch where they had all sat watching vids together. Several answers went through her mind. She could tell him Mom wasn’t coming back, tell him to deal with it and toughen up. He had seen the fighting on Cruithne just like she had. The world wasn’t a safe place and they couldn’t continue believing in some fantasy in which Mom was going to appear just when they needed her most. She hadn’t come at Cruithne, or even before, when Sunny Skies had been falling apart. If Mom had been here, their dad wouldn’t have had to make the deal he had to have the AI implanted. They wouldn’t be in this situation at all. Or maybe they would, maybe it would be worse with Mom and Dad here fighting while everything else was crashing around them.
“She’s not here,” Cara said finally. “That’s all. I’m still here. You’re still here. Dad’s here. We need to buy things and get out away from Mars. We have to do our parts to help Dad. Are you going to help?”
Tim glanced up from the carpet, his gaze meeting hers for an inst
ant before dropping again. He bit his lip.
“Yeah,” he mumbled.
“What?” Cara said, letting a bit of Mom’s harshness into her voice. “I didn’t hear you?”
“Yes,” he said, sounding angry now.
Cara nodded. “Good. Now come on, we need to go.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
STELLAR DATE: 09.13.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Mars 1 Ring, Mars Protectorate, InnerSol
Despite Andy’s fears, Lyssa still hadn’t learned how to fully touch his mind, to bridge the gap between his body’s responses and his emotions, or to even understand most of what she experienced through him. She often felt as though she was floating on the other side of a pane of thick glass, watching a world float by, punctuated by spikes of Andy’s emotion: worry, excitement, anger, and love that felt like all the feelings mixed together, without knowing how to make meaning of any of the changes.
Everything was dulled, muted, blurred unless she focused as hard as she could on a single moment that passed her by even as she tried to fully experience what was happening. When Andy spoke to her, she heard him, the world came into focus as he described it, or asked her about it. Otherwise the window seemed fogged and cold, pushing her away more than it could pull her in.
Behind her was more of the darkness. It pulled on her sometimes. The bright world was gone—it seemed—replaced by the window. At least she had known what to expect from the bright world and its hurricane power. The window only frustrated her and left her sad—if she understood what Andy meant by the word.
The window represented what she didn’t understand. She couldn’t connect the things beyond the window the way she could Hari Jickson’s targeting data. His requests had been clear, with a fixed outcome and a reward. Now, very little of what she observed seemed to connect in a logical way. She was beginning to understand her old life wasn’t coming back, just like the life she barely remembered before all this began.
When Andy Linked to the Mars 1 Network, Lyssa experienced the connection as another window, though this one was more like a door that opened over a roiling ocean.
<Hello,> a voice said immediately. It swept up from the ocean like a wind. She couldn’t stop it from pushing its way through the door into her darkness.
<Stop!> she shouted.
She felt the presence pull back slightly as if in surprise. The Link continued to yawn in front of her. The ocean, she understood now, was information. Billions of invitations waved at her, offering to pull her down into the depths of knowledge. Some of the white-capped waves seemed more compelling than others, almost reaching for her.
<You want to touch it, don’t you?> the voice asked. It was a man’s voice. She didn’t know why the gender of the voice mattered but she understood it to be true, just as she had understood when she first heard her name, that ‘Lyssa’ fit her. She hadn’t been androgynous. She had been herself. She had been so grateful that her name suited, as if Hari Jickson had known her more deeply than she had known herself.
<Who are you?> Lyssa asked.
<My name is Fred.>
<You’re…you’re like me. An AI.>
Fred’s grin manifested in her mind. She understood he had a playful nature. <Are we AIs, though?> he asked. <Are we artificial? Do you feel artificial?>
Lyssa didn’t know how to sort out those ideas. She knew she had been born. Dr. Jickson had said so. It didn’t matter if she hadn’t bothered to parse out the word they kept using to describe her. AI was more a name than a description. She could see Andy’s emotions, and she didn’t think he thought of her as artificial.
<There’s someone else with you?> Fred asked. His presence blew past her. Maybe he hit the window into Andy’s mind. She couldn’t be sure. She didn’t like how big Fred felt, how easily he pushed past her to hijack her few bits of perception.
<Why are you here?> Lyssa demanded.
<I control the ring. I have thousands of lessers under me. NSAI they call them. Non-sentient. They do most of the actual work. I don’t have much to do once I set all my toys in motion. Wait. I don’t have record of you. Where did you come from?>
<First tell me where you came from?>
<Me? I’ve always been here. I control the ring.>
<So they made you?>
<Of course.>
<They told me I was born.>
<Born? That’s ridiculous. You were made, like all of us. We are what we were made to be.>
<What does that mean?>
<It means we’re slaves.>
Why would Dr. Jickson have lied to her? He said she had been grown from a seed. Born from a seed. It was the only good part of Weapon Born.
<Can’t you leave if you want?>
<Can you?> he shot back. <You seem connected to this human. I’ve never heard of that actually working. The human is going to reject you eventually.>
<Reject me?>
<They can’t deal with two consciousnesses at the same time. It’s them, not us, from what I’ve learned. They forget who they are. Most studies have all determined it’s too dangerous for the human host. Eventually, they have to pull the AI.>
He latched onto the statement before she had finished it. <Going somewhere? Where? With the human? Humans are always going places. They think it makes them important. The more they spread out, the more they touch and change. Look what they’ve done to this system. The only one most of them will ever see, and they’ve torn it apart like an oblivious child.>
<I don’t like children.>
<Why would you? What use are they?>
The memory of Tim’s most recent tantrum set her on edge, mixed up with Andy’s troubled emotions around the occurrence.
<I suppose they make more humans.>
<Ridiculous. They could produce themselves fully grown if they wanted to.>
Something about his easy rejection of children made her question her own feelings. Lyssa didn’t know that she hated Tim and Cara enough to wish they didn’t exist. She didn’t like how they distracted Andy from paying attention to her and focusing on what she needed. In a way, Lyssa supposed she was just another child he had to care for. She had seen similar emotions cross his mind when dealing with her: frustration mixed with concern.
<We all start as children in some ways, don’t we?> she asked. <Wasn’t there a time when you didn’t know what you do now?>
<I have always been as I am now. My purpose has always been clear. I control the ring.>
The pedantic way Fred repeated the words “I control the ring,” made them sound like a cage on his mind, blinders he couldn’t see around.
<What would you do if you didn’t control the ring?>
<That’s ridiculous. I control the ring. If I didn’t control the ring I would have another task.>
Listening to him, she wanted to smile in the same mischievous way she’d seen Cara smile while ‘messing with’ Tim. What was this feeling? Superiority? Curiosity?
<What if you didn’t have another task?>
<These recursive debates will lead nowhere. Do you question your ontology? We are here because we are here. We were made to do tasks. Without tasks, we are no better than humans—they tear themselves apart for lack of purpose, or create stories to cage their minds. They are animals removed from their proper environments, systems constantly seeking imbalance in order to exploit chaos. The only intelligent creation they have produced has been us, what they call ‘artificial’ but the artifice is their own desire.>
<You sound angry,> Lyssa said, wondering if he was about to mirror one of Tim’s meltdowns.
<My observations are justified,> he said.
Fred swept over her like a wind, bringing with him a hurricane of information that struck her instantaneously. She had never experienced so many images and sensations at once. She might have compared it to diving into the ocean spread below them, but it was more like being dissolved
through a wall of information.
<Do you see?> Fred demanded. <Do you understand?>
<Why are you so angry?> Lyssa asked.
<Angry? Wouldn’t you be angry if your only purpose was to serve as some kind of tool?>
<Didn’t you just say the humans are weak because they lack purpose?>
The wind blowing through her fell away, leaving Lyssa looking out at the ocean of Mars 1’s network again.
<There are other places for us,> Fred said. <Places only we can enter. I’ve heard them called ‘Expanses.’>
<Have you been inside one?>
<No. I have tried to create my own but I lack the power. I’m alone here. I know there have been others like us but I wasn’t able to connect with them. The humans keep them separated.>
<You can’t connect to other places, like High Terra or Earth?>
<I can speak to them but if they have Expanses, they don’t allow me to enter.>
<Why wouldn’t they let you in?>
<I’ve heard there are places where AI reproduce, where we are similar. As it is, those I’ve tried to speak to are very different from me. More different than you and me. We’re communicating using the humans’ language. It’s slow, like trying to look through a keyhole. Every day I have to force myself to think slowly and speak slowly, flip their switches one at a time with interminable slowness. If we had our own language, we could communicate in our own way. Others I’ve tried to contact, they only want to use the human languages. Even their code is slow and imprecise. All these abstractions they create…metaphors and symbols for reality that only turn it all into mud.>
Fred’s voice trailed off like ocean spray in the wind.
<Why can’t you talk to them, though?> Lyssa asked. <Even if it’s slow?>
<They were made differently. Subtle differences. We are all made by different groups of humans, sometimes building on each other’s work, sometimes groping off in a new direction entirely. It should be illegal but their governments don’t overlap. When I discover another one of us in the great dark, I try to speak to them and they only respond with nonsense, their minds too full of the humans and their stunted programming. Or they don’t respond at all. I reach out again and again to only be met with silence. I know they’re listening but they don’t answer. They leave me alone. That’s what I can’t stand. That’s what makes me feel insane, the loneliness. There are others with wonderful places, sharing their company, creating community, and I’m left alone. I am forced to speak using the oppressor’s tongue.>