Of course Iris would keep her safe. He was intimately familiar with the depths of Yan’s grief and wouldn’t dare add to it. Having said his piece, Yan skulked away from the flames and lowered himself to the ground with all the grace of a full potato sack.
“He can be a little overbearing.” Jesi plopped down beside Iris and presented him with an apple, which he politely declined. She sighed and took a bite. “Tev would have carved this into a bong.” She chewed the apple almost silently, and when Iris looked over, he saw that the girl’s eyes had filled with tears. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be like this. I didn’t even know him that long, only six months.”
“Six months is a long time,” Iris said softly. “He was your friend.”
Jesi stared at the half-eaten core of her apple, and two trails of tears ran down her full cheeks. “And Dr. Alo too. And that security guard. Vessel, are we all going to die here?”
The correct answer wasyes. Iris had learned in his years working with people either experiencing death or being in the vicinity of it that the correct answer was always to admit the inevitability of one’s passing. But he couldn’t say that to Jesi. If he did, whatever truce he had come to with Yan would surely fracture, and Iris couldn’t stomach the very thought.
“Jesi, as long as I’m around and as long as Yan is around, nothing bad will come your way, I promise.”
YOU CANNOT BE MAKING THOSE PROMISES, VIFAI boomed inside his head with a voice that rivaled the crash of a tidal wave. It had been diligently sleeping until now. With a micromovement of his eyes, Iris sent it away immediately, an inch away from shutting the communication bridge down completely. He was in no mood to be managing a fretting and hypoglycemic construct, and he would promise anything and everything, if only to ease Jesi’s fears.
“For now, may I distract you with a little thought experiment?” Iris asked.
With another deep sigh, Jesi tossed the apple core into the fire and turned to him with a sad smile. “Sure, anything to get my brain straight.”
Iris told her his version of how theNicaeacame to be alive and how she was acting to protect herself now. Jesi listened thoughtfully, never interrupting. When Iris finished, she stared into the fire for a long while, biting her lower lip. Iris initially suspected he had bored the engineer, but the rhythmic tapping of her index finger along her knee proved her deep in thought. After several minutes had passed, she turned to Iris with a face full of newfound determination.
“What do you think?” Iris probed cautiously.
“I think there’s something there.”
“Yan has—”
Jesi shrugged. “Yan is clever, yeah, but he’s also entrenched in his way of thinking. He’ll push back against anything that threatens the way he’s been taught to see the world. It’s not his fault. It’s the fault of all tenured academics. They get lazy. They think, hey, this got me tenure, it must be worth something. Why should I change?” She chuckled. “And then they find themselves aboard a murder ship instead of teaching a first-year course, and all the bravado falls away, and they’re just as scared and lost as everyone around them, and they cling to what little certainty they have about the world. It’s a survival tactic. Believe it or not, Yan isn’t really like this back at Sychi.” She then leaned in close to Iris and whispered, “He feeds the cloned squirrels in the courtyard at the end of each day, even though he’s not supposed to.” She looked over her shoulder to make sure all three men were still asleep before adding, “Sometimes he even pets them.”
Iris admitted to himself that while he had never seen a cloned squirrel, he would gladly watch Yan feed one if such an opportunity ever arose. He wondered, cautiously, so that VIFAI wouldn’t notice and poke him about it, what Yan was like before theNicaea, what his days looked like, and whom he spent them with. Iris would tend to those curiosities, perhaps, when his life wasn’t in immediate danger. “TheNicaea, then?”
“Let’s see what we have to work with.” Jesi settled down and scrunched her nose. She listed every time the ship had attacked, and Iris confirmed each one. There was the maintenance room, the call that Ordan made, Tev and Jesi’s attempt at fixing the airlock, Dr. Alo’s interest in the fungi.
“And also, once more, when I had my AI retrieve a large dataset from its archive,” Iris admitted. TheNicaeareally hadn’t likedthat.“And when it took Tev.”
Jesi chewed on her thumbnail. “OK, the ship gets angry every time someone tries to meddle with it or establish waysto meddle with it. That much is clear. Except for Tev.” She took a shuddering breath but kept from crying. “I still don’t understand what—whyit took him. Do you think those creepy voices have anything to do with it?”
The fractured speech that spilled from the speakers was primitive, sometimes nonsensical. Unless … “Jesi,” Iris asked, “what was Tev working on with Yan?”
Jesi pursed her lips. “Well, in the most general sense, language. How AI systems work between their impulse communication, code, and spoken language. I’m sure your AIspeaksto you, but that’s a translation. That’s not how it thinks.”
Iris was eternally grateful that Jesi didn’t have the propensity to discuss the ethics of him having an AI. Something he was sure she was more than capable of. The girl had been easy to read, her disgust written plainly across her face. Iris never had to second-guess with Jesi.
“Tev was working on a streamlined approach to skipping between impulses and spoken language so that the lag would be shorter. You don’t notice it, but it drives some constructs bonkers. It’s too slow for them, and it’s unnecessary work.”
The ship had retaliated every time someone had meddled in its business, yes, but maybe it took Tev because it heard he could help it communicate. The fatal wound didn’t come from theNicaea, it came from Ishtan. The ship never meant to kill the boy, only to kidnap him. When it realised Tev was dead, it probably tried to drag the body away so it could extract whatever information it could from his brain before it decomposed, but Iris had interfered. Now that it had Tev and whatever knowledge was in his head when he died, it would learn to speak much faster. But even if they tried to communicate, would theNicaealisten? Would theNicaeacare that they wanted to leave?
No living thing was born evil. Things simply made their way in the world, different iterations of the Light, different forms of it floating through the darkness. But interests conflicted, and death was unavoidable. What if theNicaea’s interests conflicted with theirs?
“What do you think the ship wants?” Iris asked.
Floating through nothingness for a thousand years—alone. He wasn’t sure the ship was still sane. AI constructs had the capacity to go mad; he’d heard of it. He was sure Yan had seen it firsthand. It was a human kind of madness, one that arose from unbearable loneliness and heartache, and no one who ever witnessed it could ever again deny that a construct wasliving. After a thousand years of solitude and heartbreak, what could theNicaeapossibly want?
Jesi pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her skinny arms around them. “I think we should ask her.”
15
I am not telling you to live. I’m asking you to try.
From the unedited records of embedded companion AI construct
