What else did they get wrong?
"Think of it as—" I shrug. "I dunno, a line item on the preflight checklist. Somewhere between synch displacement field and pack toothbrush. Purely routine. What could go wrong?"
Somehow Kai's silhouette conveys a grimace. "Other than being vaporized when you fall into the sun? Or is that—the whole point? He doesn't finish but I can tell from the sudden tilt of his head that he's looking down at my wrists. Wondering if this isn't just some elaborate way of getting out from under so I can try it again, without interference…
"You know better than that." I lean forward and kiss him on the cheek, and he doesn't pull away; I call it a win. "The Sun'll die long before we do.
"We're gonna outlive the whole damn galaxy."
***
UNITED NATIONS DIASPORA AUTHORITY DEPT. CREW PSYCHOLOGY
POST-INCIDENT INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
TS TAG: EC01-2113:03:24-1043
NATURE OF INCIDENT:
AGONISTIC PHYSICAL ENCOUNTER.
SUBJECT: S. AHZMUNDIN; ASS. ERIOPHORA , F, AGE 7 (CHRON), 13 (DEV)
INTERVIEWER: M. SAWADA, DPC
SURV/BIOTEL: YZZ-284-C04
PSYCH COMMENTARY: YZZ-284-D11
M. SAWADA: Two fractured ribs and a broken nose. Not to mention the black eye.
S. AHZMUNDIN: Didn't see that coming, did you? Think you got everything figured out for the next ten million years and you can't even tell what a little kid is gonna do five minutes from now.
MS: Why did you attack Kai, Sunday?
SA: What, you can't just read my mind?
MS: Did he do something to get you angry?
SA: So you kicking me out?
MS: Is that what you want, Sunday? Is that why you keep acting up, to provoke us into expelling you? You know you can leave if you're not happy here. Nobody's keeping you against your will. I know your parents would be happy to see you again. Surprised, but—happy.
SA: I'm not like Kai. I'm not like any of them.
MS: That much is apparent.
SA: He's just the way you like us. Always doing what you tell him, never asking anything you don't want him to. That's what you want. A bunch of happy stupid robots building a bunch of happy stupid bridges for the rest of our happy stupid lives. I don't even know why you even need us.
MS: You know why.
SA: We're backup. We never even wake up unless the ship runs into something it doesn't know how to fix. Might never even happen.
MS: It'll happen. Any voyage that long—
SA: But what if it doesn't? And why do you need us anyway, why not just make machines as smart as us—smarter even—and leave us out of it?
DEAD AIR: 3
SEC MS: It's not as simple as all that. Faster machines, sure. Bigger machines, no problem. Smarter machines, well… The thing is, we can't even predict with a hundred percent certainty how a person is going to act, even when we know all the variables. You build something smarter than a person, it's pretty much guaranteed to go off and do its own thing as soon as you boot it up. And there's no way to know in advance what that might be.
SA: But people can go off and do their own thing too.
MS: People are more—stable. We have biological needs, instincts that go back millions of years. But—
SA: You mean we're easier to control. You mean you can't starve a machine to make it beh—
MS: But yes, Sunday, people do go off and do their own things. That's the whole point. And that's why we don't want a bunch of happy stupid robots, as you put it. We want you to show initiative. Which is why we cut you some slack when you sometimes take the wrong kind. But only some. So watch yourself, young lady.
DEAD AIR: 5
SEC SA: That's all?
MS: There should be more?
SA: You're not going to—punish me? For Kai?
MS: I think you owe him an apology, for whatever that's worth. That has to be your decision. But you and Kai—every spore in the program really, you have to work out your own dynamics with your own shipmates. We won't be there to punish you fifty thousand years from now.
DEAD AIR: 2 SEC
I'd love to see how your social systems evolve over time. What I wouldn't give to go with you.
SA: You… you knew. I bet you knew.
MS: Knew what?
SA: That I was going to beat up Kai. You wanted me to!
MS: Why would you even say that, Sunday? Why would we want you to attack a fellow recruit?
SA: I dunno. Maybe, maybe he was bad and I was his punishment. Maybe you wanna see our social systems evolve over time. Maybe you just like it when we fight.
MS: I promise you, Sunday, none of us get any pleasure from—
SA: Maybe you don't even know. You're not like us, right? We're easy, you built us to work like this. That's how you know what we're gonna do. But who built you, huh? Nobody. You're just random.
DEAD AIR: 3 SEC
You're free.
***
READ CAREFULLY
YOU ARE ABOUT TO EMBARK UPON A JOURNEY LEADING TO A COGNITIVE AUTONOMY THAT YOU HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED BEFORE. WHILE SOME CLIENTS HAVE DESCRIBED THEIR SUNDIVES AS ECSTATIC, RELIGIOUS, AND PROFOUNDLY FULFILLING, INDUSTRIAL ENLIGHTENMENT INC. CAN NOT GUARANTEE A PLEASANT EXPERIENCE. WE CONTRACT SOLELY TO PROVIDE EXPOSURE TO A PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT ALLOWING YOU TO THINK YOUR OWN THOUGHTS IN A WAY YOU NEVER COULD BEFORE. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CONTENT OF THOSE THOUGHTS, OR FOR ANY POTENTIAL TRAUMA RESULTING THEREFROM. BY ENTERING INTO THIS CONTRACT, YOU ARE EXPLICITLY ABSOLVING INDUSTRIAL ENLIGHTENMENT INC., AND ALL OF ITS AGENTS AND REPRESENTATIVES, FROM RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY NEGATIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACTS THAT MAY RESULT FROM THIS EXPERIENCE.
Base Camp is a foil-wrapped potato nine hundred meters long, robbed of its spin and left to bake at the Lagrange point just inside Mercury. At least, that's where it is when we close for docking; we've barely debarked before it starts reeling itself sunwards, a diving bell bound for perdition.
They're using one of our old prototypes, a displacement drive with an exagram quantum-loop hole in its heart. I like what they've done with the thing. It doesn't just smear the camp's center of mass along some inner wormhole; it leaves one end behind at L1, hangs off Mercury's mass like a stone on a string. The energy it must take to stabilize that kind of attenuation boggles the mind—but the sun's breathing in our faces, and the same metamaterial that makes the potato such a perfect reflector can just as easily turn it into a blackbody when they need juice for antimatter production.