“There is a pulse, a rhythm that carries throughout the ship. It doesn’t feelsimple.”
“Why not?”
Iris looked up from where he was sitting. Yan leaned forwards in his chair, holding Iris’s gaze with interest. The left corner of his lips was twitching as he fought back a smile, clearly convinced this was another guessing game they wereplaying. But as long as Iris had his attention … “There’s a pattern to it. An intelligent and deliberate pattern.”
“Good try. A dripping tap also has a pattern, doesn’t mean it’s intelligent.” The left corner of Yan’s lips twitched again. Strangely, and against all expectations, he appeared to be enjoying their exchange.
Iris hesitated. The next piece of information would bring more of him into the light. He wasn’t sure how he felt about Yan knowing this much. How much would he have to tell him? How much of himself would he expose in their back-and-forth? None of it would he be able to take back. It was somewhat common knowledge, and the engineer, of all people, should have already guessed, and still … “My AI received a ping, a weak one, but a ping, at the orchard, upstairs.”
Yan rubbed the narrow bridge of his nose. To Iris’s relief, he said nothing about the mention of an AI. Nothing of the fact Iris had saidmyAI. Nothing at all on the matter. “There’s an orchard upstairs?”
“There’s all sorts of things upstairs, engineer Yan.”
Yan didn’t challenge him. Iris watched the engineer think, thin lines folding along his forehead as his lips moved with soft whispers.Improbable, highly improbable—Iris read Yan’s lips—maybe residual signal?Yan’s eyes ran along the floor as if scanning invisible pages he had memorised during his studies.Then again—in a single, fluid motion, he pursed his lips together and with a nod, looked directly at Iris. “All right. You got me. Show me the orchard.” He pushed himself out of his chair and hopped over the console. There was some rummaging and clanking until Yan finally emerged with a small device in his hands, a foldable keyboard, and a miniature screen tucked under his arm. “Let’s go.”
Frozen to the floor, Iris asked, dumbfounded, “Youbelieveme?”
“I’m interested. I’m not quite convinced.” And then Yan gave him a flicker of a smile, just long enough for Iris to notice, not long enough for him to make any sense of it. “It’s not a matter ofbelief, Vessel.”
7
Death will not be swooned by beauty, by riches, by prayer, nor by pure will alone. It will take its due when the time comes.
Do not hasten Death when it is not yet there; do not fight it when it arrives. Only what we do in the interim between the awareness of Death and its arrival matters.
But what have I done?
Excerpt from “The Way of the Vessel”
by Vessel Iris
They climbed the stairs in silence.
To be exact, Iris climbed the stairs in silence, using his remaining willpower to point his eyes forward and keep his mind away from violent urges. Meanwhile, Yan made more noise than was necessary, with both his boots and his cursing about carrying too much, despite carrying very little. His voice echoed through the tall stairwell, amplified with each additional step. Iris ran his mala through his fingers in a futile attempt to ground himself.
“Creepy,” Yan said when Iris finally led him to the decrepit corridor of the third deck. “Looks like somewhere I’d get murdered, and no one would hear me scream.”
Iris ignored him and hopped over a puddle, half hoping Yan would step right into it and electrocute himself. It was unlikelyto happen, and it wouldn’t be technically murder, but Yan wouldn’t appreciate the difference.
“Don’t your feet get cold like that?”
The engineer had successfully made it over the puddle, after all. Iris wiggled his toes a little, then curled them inwards. Yes, they were almost always cold, but he paid them no mind. The cold was just another annoyance, another addition to the myriad unpleasant sensations he had conditioned himself to ignore. Ruminating on his cold feet wouldn’t warm them. Ruminating on anything at all never produced the desired effect. Better to let go. “Not at all,” Iris said instead and kept on walking steadily down the corridor.
When he pulled open the doors to the orchard, the humid air struck them both in the face like a damp pillow. Yan hurriedly pushed past the doors, grumbling something about the humidity being bad for electronics. Iris smiled at the sweet smell of rotting apples and followed him inside.Let me know if anything pings you,he told VIFAI, and it agreed, busy with its background ministrations. Cut off from the universal feed, it was shooting off requests to anything remotely operational aboard, attempting to triangulate some sort of connection, so far unsuccessfully.
“So, this is where you got all the apples.” Yan picked a glistening red fruit from the closest tree. He rubbed the apple against his trousers, and once he had deemed it clean enough, took a bite. “Not bad,” he mumbled with a full mouth. Still chewing, Yan circled the orchard, scanning the walls. Iris kept a close eye on the engineer, but otherwise let him have his freedom. Here was safe.
When Yan finally found what he was searching for, it was a panel, similar to the one beside the maintenance room door. He unceremoniously pried it open with nothing more than hisfingernails and brute force—as expected. This outward display of unrefined strength that Iris would normally find displeasing had landed as impressive, in a primitive sort of way, the way one might be impressed with how easily a boar can toss a tree-trunk. But as the panel cover slammed against the wall, Iris was at once yanked under a strengthened phantom pulse, wrestling his own heart’s rhythm. It resonated through him like the beating of a monstrous drum.
It’s pinging me again,VIFAI said, but Iris could only wince in response. For a moment, his balance left him, and he blindly groped for a tree trunk to steady himself. But there, in the tree trunk, the beating was even stronger, pushing against his fingertips through the bark with the force of an oceanic tide.
“Is this where your AI got pinged?” Yan asked, the engineer’s voice sounding muffled, like he was speaking underwater. Iris forced his eyes open; he didn’t know when he had shut them in the first place. The orchard around him swam. The trees and Yan himself became nothing more than blurry, shifting outlines.
“Yes.” He forced the word out, gripping the tree trunk as hard as he could despite the persistent beating. “I think we’re being watched.” Yan must have done something to the panel because the pulse had turned jagged, and the spot where VIFAI’s implant was embedded ignited with white-hot pain. A familiar pain to what Iris had experienced when the implant was first inserted into his brain stem. He had, until this moment, been successful in blocking out the worst of those memories.
It’s trying to say something.
Tell it to stop,Iris begged and clutched the nape of his neck.Tell it to stop before it melts my brain.
