Still, for now it had cemented the captain’s hold over the crew, so when she said to set course directly into an atmospheric anomaly that would bathe the ship in an immeasurable quantity of electromagnetic radiation, she’d been obeyed without question.
Well, without question from anybody but Locke, who wasn’t letting this go anywhere near that easily. “There is nopossiblecommercially justifiable reason for this.”
By the laws of the sky, the lack of a commercial justification was the most important problem with the captain’s plan. To everybody who thought Olympus Extraction State could go fuck itself, which included me, a hefty chunk of the crew, the captain, and—in some ways most importantly—Locke themself, it felt pretty weaksauce.
“Advisor,” replied the captain to thin air.
“The proposed path,” said the voice of her machine intelligence from the captain’s table, “is the one that gives us the best chance of catching the Möbius Beast.”
It was the first time the captain had invoked the intelligence in front of Locke but by this stage its presence aboard was an open secret, so they took it very much in stride. “And if we die?”
“I can only answer the questions I’m asked.”
Locke hadn’t been talking to the machine. They’d been talking to the captain. But theyhadgotten an answer, and withthe suspicious expression of somebody who has known another somebody for too long and learned too much about the way they think, Locke fixed her with a challenging glare. “And what did you ask?”
“How best to catch the Beast,” she replied, more evasively than I was used to from her.
Locke spotted that as well and clearly wasn’t in the mood for evasion. “What were yourexactwords?”
With a ya-got-me smile, the captain replied, “I asked if, all else being equal, choosing not to avoid atmospheric hazards would improve our chances of catching up with the Beast more quickly.”
“And I said it would,” added the machine cheerfully. “Because it will.”
“You mean,” Locke clarified, still ignoring the intelligence, perhaps hoping that if they did, it would stop existing, “that you asked if choosing the fastest route would be fastest, and the machine said yes?”
“In essence,” replied the machine.
“It could have said otherwise,” added the captain.
“I could,” the machine confirmed.
Locke looked unconvinced. Which was to be expected because this was incredibly unconvincing. “Intelligence,” they said, finally addressing the machine, “state your operational parameters.”
A jaunty jingle played over comms. “Hi, I’m the Fidelity multipurpose strategic advisory networked machine intelligence. My job is to support my fantastic users with detailed, unbiased advice and data-processing support tailored to their specific, unique needs. Fidelity, the inspiration font, the flame device logo, and the ‘Stronger Together’ musical sting are registered trademarks of Athabasca Neural Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Elysium Data State.”
“That sounds a lot like your job is to tell people what they want to hear.”
One of the things Q, whose people had no such marvelsas our machine intelligences, always found disturbing about them was how easily they could convey emotion. Fidelity now sounded extremely offended. “I think you’ll find that’s a common misconception. I’m fully compliant with the recommendations of several voluntary regulatory bodies.”
Locke stared out into the storm, where weird lights took turns coloring the clouds in all the shades of the visible spectrum. “And if we sail into a microwave anomaly and it fries your circuits?”
“Firstly,” replied Fidelity, back to its usual upbeat tone, “that isn’t actually how I work. Secondly, I’m running on redundant, electromagnetically shielded systems. Thirdly, I’m trained to prioritize my users’ needs above my own safety.”
I’d say the captain had been listening to this exchange with uncharacteristic patience, but actually she’d been ignoring it with characteristic disinterest. Only when the chatter between the first mate and the machine had died away did she shut things down with a clear “My order stands. We hold course.”
And her order stood. And we held course.
Much as the crew usually avoided staring out into the storm because it reminded us of how dead we all probably were, charging headlong into an electromagnetic anomaly pushed us through denial into a kind of fatalistic wonder. If wewereon a doomed voyage into an undiscovered sky from whose bourn we would never return then we could, at least, take time to appreciate the beauty along the way.
And the elves was beautiful.
Very probably, my crewmates and I are the only human beings ever to have seen an atmospheric event that large, that close, and that wonderful. What percentage of us, after all, ever even go to Jupiter? Of that fraction, what fraction brave the Heart? And of that fraction of a fraction, who would ever fly directly into an electromagnetic event?
Who would see it and live to tell the tale?
The ship bore on into the anomaly and the hull caught fire.
Not literally, I should add. We weren’t at the kind oftemperature or, for that matter, in the kind of atmosphere where either metal or Leviathan bone will actually combust. But a corona of emissive events gathered around the ship, bathing her in an eerie light that shifted hues through green to violet and back again.
