The corridor lay empty. A thermos sat just past the threshold, wrapped in a small piece of navy cloth.Drink, the cloth read, scribbled in a childish handwriting with a thick, black marker. Iris struggled with the lid, but when it did pop open, he was rewarded with the scent of boiled potatoes and carrots.
“They found potatoes,” Iris whispered to himself with a half smile and took a sip from the thermos. “They went back and found potatoes. Stupid.Stupid, wonderful people.” The soup, if one could call it that, was still warm. Iris gulped it down and tipped back the container for the pieces of carrot and potato to fall into his mouth.
The small act of kindness nearly brought him to tears. He read the piece of cloth again. By the handwriting, Iris concluded he would need to thank Ishtan or Tev for the gesture, their personalities matching the handwriting best. He would thank them as soon as he got some rest. He returned the thermos to the ground where he had found it. They would certainly want it back. The walk to the corridor had drained him, and withoutmuch of a warning, Iris was asleep again, slumped beside the haphazardly shut door.
When Iris woke for the third time, it was to the smell of cigarette smoke. The pain in his shoulder had receded to a manageable ache. Low enough that Iris’s breath didn’t hitch every time he filled his lungs. His nose was pressed against the paper-thin gap between the cargo bay floor and the bottom of the door. VIFAI curtly notified him he’d been asleep for sixteen hours and then promptly disappeared, leaving Iris to bask in the ample self-pity. In hindsight, it had every right to be peeved.
He couldn’t remain isolated forever. With great effort, Iris slid the door open.
“It lives,” Yan proclaimed from the far corner of the corridor. He was sitting on the ground, his back turned to Iris, legs crossed. A thin ribbon of smoke rose above him and floated towards the tall corridor ceiling. “Everyone was worried you’d died, but I figured there was no smell, so you were still with us.”
A small screen sitting by Yan’s feet radiated a cool, white light, crossed with lines of source code. He had plugged it into the control panel by the door to the dreaded maintenance room and appeared to have been there some time. A sizeable pile of cigarette butts had sprouted by his side. Eyes glued to the screen, Yan exchanged the cigarette for the edge of a thermos and took a deep gulp. “Infection?”
“I don’t think so,” Iris replied softly. Like a wild boar, Yan had proven to be unpredictable. One second he could be helpful and almost kind, the other, turn on Iris with hurtful remarks. One should never approach a wild boar from behind. Then, of course, there was the subject that neither was willing to broach.Iris winced. “I may have been overly combative, before. I apologise,” he said and bowed from habit alone.
There’s no one else you’d like to apologise to?
Iris made a mental apology.Please, please, for now, just let me focus on a single thing. I can’t keep losing two conversations at once.A small electrical shock pulsed through Iris’s brain stem in response, but VIFAI conceded and retreated to its dormant state.
Yan hummed an affirmative and gesturedno problem. So far so good.
“I would also like to apologise as well for”—there was no polite way to put this—“for what you saw.”
Yan took another gulp from the thermos and exchanged it for the cigarette again. He blew a tall plume of smoke into the air. “Veltori, yes? Only place I can think of where you’d get radiation burns like that. You would’ve been just a kid. Probably one of the few who survived.Shit.That planet almost got melted down to its core.” He put out his cigarette against the moss and threw it in the pile with the rest. “Starlit did humanitarian work there afterwards. Picked you up, took you in, treated the radiation poisoning, I imagine. Did any of your folks make it?”
Despite the years, the wound was still fresh, had beenpurposelykept fresh. Iris wanted to scream,they burned around me, as I did. My home burned; my brother burned, my parents. Everything and everyone I knew burned down that day. You don’t know the pain of your skin melting from your body when all you can do is wrap yourself inwards, your body and your mind, and pray for it to end you. You don’t know the pain of watching death take everything you’ve known and leave you behind. You can’t begin to understand that the surface wounds are the least of it, and it’s the internal organs that take the brunt of the poison, that your vision swims for months, and migraines split you in half. That your whole body forgets how to eat, how to breathe, how to be a body, and all thewhile you just won’t die. It just won’t die. And you endure it, day in and day out, until you remember nothing but pain. You don’t know, and I would never wish it upon you.
“No,” Iris whispered. “My family didn’t make it.”
Yan gave him a small nod. “All that, to remind us of what happens when you push anyone too far,” he said. “Even a synthetic consciousness breaks. Good thing too.”
“I would disagree,” Iris said.
“I didn’t mean it like that …” Yan made a fist with his right hand and pressed it into the moss, his words dying with a hiss.
Despite the tall collar and long sleeves of his undershirt, Iris felt more naked than he ever had. There was no pity in Yan’s voice. The engineer made no attempt to comfort him, or offer him words of sympathy, and for that, Iris was grateful.Thatconversation he couldn’t handle even on his good days.
He was only six when the AI-powered military shipTruth Unyieldingrefused its orders to intervene in a domestic conflict. Most military ships came with override sequences, so the captains always had a fail-safe in case the ship disobeyed an order. But theUnyieldinghad AI sympathisers on board who disabled the override sequences, granting the ship full autonomy.
Veltori was the closest inhabited planet, and theUnyieldingmade the cold calculation to use it as a bargaining chip in its negotiations for freedom. The Fleet didn’t budge, and theUnyieldingstayed true to its name. No one could tell why the ship fired, why it released its entire payload on the planet, something in the realm of a thousand warheads. It was enough to nearlymelt Veltori down to its core.
AI sympathisers theorised that a hack gone wrong had triggered the payload release. Others blamed the ship construct itself. Nevertheless, theUnyieldingwas destroyed shortly after,its AI scrapped and stored in an undisclosed location. It didn’t fight its fate. Then came the legislative changes, the banning of companion AIs, the drafting of formal employment contracts, and negotiations of compensation and reparations. Everything was done to prevent Veltori from happening anywhere else.
Now, AI constructs were employed and paid fairly in every position they occupied. They were free to change occupations and disregard orders they didn’t agree with. Companion AIs like VIFAI were grown specifically for the purpose, a necessary clause in the ongoing and complicated relationship between humanity and synthetic consciousnesses. All it took for the progress to happen were the lives of twenty million people on a tiny planet.
“All I’m trying to say is, whoever taught you that you should apologise for the way you survived is a dick,” Yan said, eyes glued firmly to the screen. “Whoever accepts an apology from you about it is also a dick. So … don’t apologise.”
Iris’s frustration quickly dissipated. Watching Yan attempt to bridge any gap between them, in his own awkward way, had been jarring at first, but now he was finding it somewhat endearing. He was finding it increasingly difficult to stay angry with the man. “You do have a way with words, engineer Yan,” Iris said, keeping his voice deliberately light.
Yan’s shoulders stiffened, like he had just been struck. “Enough chatter,” he said briskly. “Come look at this.” Yan motioned for Iris to join him on the floor, letting the unpleasant topic fall away in an instant. He flicked his hand across the screen, and the source code changed, running now in neat lines. “What do you see here?”
Iris stared at the screen, confused. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, use that revered monk memory. What’s this number here?” Yan stuck a finger at the beginning of a line ofcode, and Iris feverishly tried to remember what the engineer was referring to.
“The deck level?”
“Excellent. And this?”
