“Oh”—Yan’s fish-tank voice came from above—“don’t tell me the apples weren’t good after all. Riyu will be so pissed.”
“It’s trying to speak,” Iris managed to say; that, and nothing more.Tell it to stop trying to speak, I beg you.Iris formed the single coherent thought and was again captured by a wave of unprecedented agony. And then, in an instant, like waking from a nightmare, the pain vanished. Cautiously, Iris opened his right eye and then his left. The searing white curtain that had blinded him only moments ago had been lifted. His cheeks were covered in a mixture of tears and dirt from where his face was pressed into the ground. He wiped his face with his sleeve and sat back on his heels, dumbstruck. The pain was instantly forgotten.
It agreed, VIFAI said, and Iris breathed a sigh of relief. He would be spared, for now.
“Do I want to know?” Yan was crouching by the spot where Iris had crumbled. He didn’t look nor sound conventionally worried, but his voice was low and free of sarcasm, and Iris was grateful for that grain of compassion alone. “Or is this more of apersonalissue?” Yan was also gracious enough to maintain a respectful distance between them. He was still chewing on his apple between words.
“My AI got pinged again,” Iris said, finally catching his breath. “The first time it got pinged, everything was procedural, but this time it felt like something was forcing its way into my brain. We’ve established communication with other constructs before, but this is highly peculiar. There’s also the pulse. I feel it more the closer we get to the centre of the ship. I think itisthe ship.”
Saying nothing in return, Yan rocked back on his heels and went to the control panel. He plugged in his little keyboard and computer and typed out a sequence of keystrokes. “Do you know why we teach AI constructs human speech?” Yan asked,his eyes flickering between the keyboard and the little screen he had placed at his feet.
“So that they could communicate?”
Yan let out a sharpha!“Typical answer, but, no, oh,Divine One.”
Iris frowned. There was no need for name-calling.
“Constructs have no trouble communicating at all without spoken language. In fact, they do it much faster and more precisely when we don’t ask them to speak. We have themspeakso that we can understand them because we are far too thick to learntheirlanguage.”
Iris passed a trembling hand across the smooth dome of his head, and it came back slick with sweat. Here they were, again, in some manner of truce where the engineer shared his expertise and humoured Iris’s suspicions before Yan grew eventually bored or irritated and they’d be at odds again. “Are you suggesting, engineer Yan, that whatever it is, it was trying to speak to me in its own language?”
Yan shrugged and typed out another sequence. His half-eaten apple lay forgotten by his feet. “Perhaps. There are too many conditions it would need to meet to do that. First, it would need to be an actual construct, which I highly doubt. This ship is over a thousand years old, and proper ship-based AI systems are only a couple hundred. It’s very unlikely theNicaeawould have had an AI system at departure and, frankly, downright impossible that it managed to develop one mid-flight. Second, whateveritis would need to have a way of communicating that didn’t align with your AI’s presets. Which, again, would mean it would have to be an actual thousand-year-old AI, and that, as previously stated, is downright, batshit insane. What’s more likely”—Yan cracked his neck to the left and rolled his head around—“is that someone is aboard this ship and thatsomeonehas picked up on your AI’s signal that they’re now trying to hijack. It wouldn’t feel too good on your end, and it definitely wins the probability award.”
“Why would they do that?”
“So many good questions, Vessel. I’d say they’re trying to disable you since you’re the only voice here proclaiming how it’s wrong to take the ship apart. Yes, Ishtan told me. No secrets among colleagues.” Yan raised his hand to stop Iris from refuting him. “I’d even say if your own temple wanted the ship, it wouldn’t want you advocating the opposite.”
“Starlit holds nothing but respect for those who came aboard the generation ships. To leave home in such a way”—Iris was deliberately ignoring the implications of what Yan had said—“to leave everything you know behind and plummet into the darkness with no destination. I’m not certain how they were ever brave enough to do it, but they deserve nothing but our respect. How can anyone be that brave?”
“What’syourdestination, Vessel?” Yan asked and pulled a cigarette from his pocket. He made a point of slowly lighting it and taking a deep drag. Catching Iris’s frigid glare, Yan’s lips stretched in a self-satisfied grin. The smoke streamed from his parted lips like fog on an early winter’s morning. “Would you look at that? A miracle, truly.” He took another drag. “If you think about it, Vessel, we’re just the same, tumbling through space with no goal or destination. Our ship is just metaphorical in nature and bigger and can’t be sold for millions. Your temple would probably be more concerned with one they could turn a profit from.” He motioned for Iris to crouch down to his level and look at the screen. “I think you were right about us being watched, but they’re not doing it through cameras. The camera feed, here, it’s dead. Don’t know how long ago it went dead, but it’s dead now. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but all the cameras arebusted too. Maybe deliberately, maybe just as a product of time. Who knows? But whoever is watching us is looking at the little bursts of signal wherever we interact with the ship.”
“Like trying to jury-rig a maintenance control room door?” Iris asked, half smiling, only a little peeved to go without a cigarette once again.
Yan made a point of blowing a puff of smoke in Iris’s direction. “Yes. Like that.”
“Can we do the same? Can we watch for these little bursts of signal to see where they are interacting with the ship?”
“Very good, Vessel,” Yan muttered, his fingers running across the keys in rehearsed patterns. A timid flash of hope and pride sprang up in Iris’s chest. “Maybe you’re not completely useless after all.”
Oh, how brief were both hope and pride.
“Look here.” Yan pointed to a string of code running across the small screen. “Here’s the deck level, and here are all the various doors and switches. When a signal goes through to open or close a door, there’s a change.” Yan pointed to one such flicker in the code. “Here, see? Someone opened a door.”
Iris furrowed his brow. Hidden in the text and numbers that ran across the screen in neat little rows was a single digit of importance. He followed the code the way Yan did, breaking it down into sets of coordinates. Deck level. He searched for it on screen.Is this what you see? How you see?Iris asked VIFAI.
This is the bridge between how I see and how you see. I see what those numbers and letters represent. I see, if you can call it that, the signal itself.VIFAI noticed the simmering frustration flooding Iris’s synapses as he tried to decipher the code.Don’t blame yourself. You’re not made to see the signal, to speak it. We are inherently two different things or two different makes. But imagine converting this to speech, and you’ll understand why it’s faster to just communicate in signal.
Iris understood. It didn’t help him at all, but he understood. He too was of a different make than others, speaking a language no one else spoke. Very often, he wished for silent communication, to be understood exactly, without filter or translation, or elaboration, or reliance on metaphor. It would alleviate much of his frustration as well. “Isn’t that our deck?”
Yan held out his hand to silence Iris and scanned the screen, a tendon along his neck tensing as he mouthed something to himself. “Yes. It’s far off from where we are. All the same, let’s call all the doors and spots we can interact with the ship seams. All the seams are sequential. This one is—”
But Iris couldn’t say silent, not when he was so certain. “No. I meant this one.” He jabbed a thin finger on the screen. “This one right here is the airlock Ishtan and I checked out. Someone just opened it. Or closed it, I can’t tell.”
“Opened it. Didn’t you say it was toast?” Yan asked, voice hushed. He shut the screen and scurried to his feet. “Let’s go. I want to see what’s going on there.”
It’s trying to ping me again, VIFAI said.
“Engineer Yan, we’re unarmed. I don’t think this is the best idea.”
