Afternoons were for hanging out. Antonio introduced a role-playing game, Breaking News, in which the participants had to guess where the next big stories would happen and arrange coverage from a limited supply of news teams. Rudy enjoyed it, maybe because he was good at it. In the evenings they ran the VR, watching shows, taking turns picking titles. Sometimes they plugged themselves in as the characters; sometimes they let the pros do it. They ran murder mysteries, comedies, thrillers. Nothing heavy. The most rousing of the batch was the musical Inside Straight, in which Hutch played a golden-hearted casino owner on Serenity, threatened by Rudy as the bumbling gangster Fast Louie, and pursued by Antonio as the old boyfriend who had never given up and in the end saved her life and her honor.
Or maybe it was Battle Cry, the American Civil War epic, in which Antonio portrayed Lincoln with an Italian accent, Rudy showed up as Stonewall Jackson, and Hutch made a brief appearance as Annie Etheridge, the frontline angel of the Michigan Third.
Battle Cry was twelve hours long, and ran for three nights while cannons blazed and cavalry charged and the Rebel yell echoed through the Preston. There were times Rudy thought he could smell gunpowder. Often they watched from within a narrow rock enclosure while the action swirled around them.
Occasionally, he looked outside at the blackness. It wasn’t really a sky. There was no sense of depth, no suggestion that you could travel through it and hope to arrive somewhere. It simply seemed to wrap around the ship. As if there were no open space. When Hutch, at his request, turned on the navigation lights, they did not penetrate as far as they should have. The darkness seemed more than simply an absence of light. It had a tangibility all its own. “If you wanted to,” he asked Hutch, “could you go outside?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“Look at it. The night actually presses against the viewports.”
She frowned. Nodded. “I know. It’s an illusion.”
“How do you know?”
“It has to be.”
“It wasn’t something we checked on the test flights. We just assumed—”
“I doubt,” said Antonio, “it was one of the things Jon gave any thought to.”
“Probably not,” Hutch said. “But I don’t know. Maybe if you tried to go outside, you’d vanish.”
“Pazzo,” said Antonio.
“Maybe,” she said. “But is it any stranger than particles that are simultaneously in two different places? Or a car that’s neither dead nor alive?”
“You have a point,” said Rudy. He was frowning.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I was thinking I wouldn’t want to get stuck here.”
As they drew toward the end of the third week, he was becoming accustomed to the routine. Maybe it was because they could see the end of the first leg of the flight. There was daylight ahead. Makai 4417. Home of the race that, at least fifty thousand years ago, had dispatched the chindi. What kind of civilization would they have now?
His flesh tingled at the thought.
He became more tolerant of Antonio and began to merge him again with Dr. Science. “You really enjoyed doing those shows,” he told him. “I could see that. We need more programs like that now. Kids today don’t have a clue how the world works. There was a study a month ago that said half of NAU students couldn’t name the innermost planet.”
They were doing more VR now. And it had become more enjoyable. There was Rudy in Voyage, as Neil Armstrong striding out onto the lunar surface, delivering the celebrated line, “One small step for man.” And Antonio as the fabled saloon keeper Mark Cross. “Keep your eyes on me, sweetheart, and your hands on the table.” And Hutch playing The Unsinkable Molly Brown with such energy and aplomb that he suspected she’d missed her calling. Even Phyl became part of the camaraderie, portraying Catherine Perth, the young heroine who’d stayed behind on a broken ship so her comrades could get home from the first Jupiter mission.
All pretense of doing constructive work got tossed over the side. Rudy found no more time for the science journals. Antonio gave up working on the book that he wanted to take back with him. “Get it later,” he said. “Can’t write it if nothing’s happened yet.”
AIs had, of course, always been an inherent part of Rudy’s existence. They reported incoming calls, managed the house, woke him in the morning, discussed issues relating to the Foundation, commented on his choice of clothes. In the world at large, they watched kids, directed traffic, managed global communications systems, and warned people not to expose themselves too long to direct sunlight.
They were the mechanisms that made life so leisurely for most of the world’s population. They served in an unlimited range of capacities, and required virtually nothing of their owners save perhaps an annual maintenance visit. The revolt of the machines, predicted ever since the rise of the computer, had never happened. They lived with Rudy and his brothers and sisters around the world in a happy symbiosis.
When, occasionally, it was time to replace the household AI, most people found it difficult. They established personal relationships with the things just as earlier generations had with automobiles and homes. The AI was a German shepherd with an IQ. Everyone knew they were not really intelligent, not really sentient. It was all an illusion. But Rudy never bought it. He readily admitted to being one of those nitwits who refused to let United Communications remove his AI and replace it with the new Mark VII model. It might have been only software. But so, in the end, was Rudy.
Spending his evenings with Hutch, Antonio, and Phyl had a peculiar effect. Together they fought off desert bandits, hung out at the Deadwood Saloon, rode with Richard’s knights, dined in Paris in 1938, celebrated with Jason Yamatsu and Lucy Conway in Cherry Hill on the night the transmission came in from Sigma 2711. Phyl usually appeared as a young woman with bright red hair and glorious green eyes.
It might have been his imagination, or simply Phyllis’s programming, but he began to sense that those green eyes lingered on him, that she watched him with something more than the script required. Hutch noticed it, too, and commented with an amused smile. “More than a passing interest, I see.” It was partly a joke, not something to be taken seriously. Not really.
At night, he began sitting up in the common room after the others had retired. Phyl came to him when he spoke to her, sometimes audio only, sometimes visual. They talked about books and physics and her life aboard the starship. She hadn’t used the term, but it was how he understood it. Her life. She enjoyed talking with the pilots, she said. And with the passengers. Especially the passengers.
“Why?” he asked.
“The pilots are mostly about routine. Inventories, check-off lists, activate the portside scope. Turn twelve degrees to starboard. They’re pretty dull.”
“I guess.”
“If they’re on board long enough, passengers sometimes get past thinking of me as simply part of the ship. As a navigational and control system that talks. They take time to say hello. The way you did.”
“Does that really matter to you?”
“It makes for a more interesting conversation. Hell, Rudy, if all you want to do is tell me to open the hatch and serve the sandwiches, I’m going to get pretty bored. You know what I mean.”