I’m not as creative as some of my shipmates have been. I don’t make anything. I have a ukulele, which is a nicely compact instrument that doesn’t require too much sound baffling to be played inside a hull. And mine is not some priceless antique made of real Terran wood or anything. It’s a soundbox and neck printed out of nice, dense polymer, with old-fashioned strings that make noise by vibrating and causing echoes, and pegs to tune it. It has a bridge and a nut and no audio pickups at all. If we had to take it apart for consumables, Sally could print me another one as soon as we got back to port and filled our hoppers again.
That’s never happened yet, though. Space is scary. But not scary enough to eat my uke.
Not yet, anyway.
More importantly, I’m an okay-enough player that my shipmates don’t mind. Especially since I make sure I don’t practice all the time.
That’s what VR games are for.
The sandbox-style ones are best for long trips, because you don’t run out of things to do. There are always more flowers to pick or butterflies to milk or coins to grind. My current favorite is probably kind of too much like my daily life to really count as recreation: it’s Orphan Queen, where you explore an abandoned space ship and find Mysterious Things. Well, that’s my favorite unless my favorite is the historical Fascism and Facsimile. But Melusine is great, too, especially the content tranche where you’re climbing around inside the giant clock in the palace walls. I have to play them all in single-player mode, unless Tsosie is in the mood, because you can’t exactly get a real-time network across hundreds of light-ans. I do some play by packet, too, which gets me some interaction outside of the ship’s community, even if it’s asynchronous.
I like my coworkers. But if you’ve never been trapped in three hundred and fifty cubic meters with five other sentients, I invite you to try it before you judge how far I’m willing to go to talk to somebody else once in a while. Loese and Tsosie have families; Hhayazh and Rhym have in-species social associations. I keep in touch with my daughter, Rache, but she’s at that age where she wants to prove her independence and autonomy, so I don’t find out much about what’s going on. And I get the sense that Rache feels I’m kind of an absentee parent, which… okay, fair.
Her other mom and I don’t talk much anymore.
The packet games are slow. I’ve been playing one particular one since I was in the Judiciary: it’s gotten through almost a whole week of game time now.
It’s nice to have the continuity through my life, however.
This trip, I didn’t get as much roleplaying done as I might otherwise. We were bending light with our speed, Sally putting her overclocked white coils to the test, the warp-striated bands of starshine from the galaxy outside our bubble scrolling past in a steady flicker. We must have passed pretty close to a star at one point, because it got so bright outside I thought we had somehow reached the Core much in advance of our ETA. Afar’s shielding held up, though, and his crew kept right on breathing.
The speed wasn’t why I was busy: Sally and Loese handled that comfortably on their own. Helen was the ongoing distraction. Helen, who had been left alone for a very long time indeed. Helen, who wasn’t emotionally stable.
Since I’d insisted on rescuing her, the rest of Sally’s crew seemed unified in their opinion that entertaining the peripheral with PTSD was my problem. Sally was our AI medic, and she still had access to Helen’s code and was teaching herself the archaic language Helen was programmed in. I was confident that Sally was doing everything she could to patch up Helen’s psyche—and, in fact, Helen seemed to be getting more focused and coherent and less like a brain trauma patient as Sally went to work on her operating system. And possibly her processors as well. I didn’t have the skills to know what was going on inside that peripheral, and since she wasn’t my patient, privacy dictated that I not ask Sally unless I needed the information professionally.
I did know that it would be incredibly traumatic and would cause a lot of data loss for any modern AI to be constrained in a physical plant as small as Helen’s body. Perhaps arrogantly, I assumed Big Rock Candy Mountain wouldn’t have miniaturization on the level the Synarche did, which meant the processors in Helen must be bursting, and her working memory badly overstressed. It must have been equally traumatic when the microbots hived off—or when she chose to hive them off. An AI couldn’t suffer a psychotic break, exactly. But they had their own varieties of sophipathology, and dissociation of their various subroutines into disparate personalities was definitely one that had been well-testified in the literature.
Even I, who did not have Sally’s expertise in her specialty, knew that.
Whatever the relationship between Helen and the tinkertoys, the machine didn’t seem to communicate verbally. That was Helen’s sole province. When she wasn’t aphasic, I mean. So as part of her therapy, I wound up designated to communicate verbally with her.
When Sally assigned me, I thought about protesting. But if I didn’t do it, somebody else would have to. And it wasn’t that onerous, even if I’m much better at prying people out of critically damaged space ships than I have ever been at making small talk.
Maybe that’s why I like play-by-packet games: you have all the time in the world to come up with something to say.
My duties were pretty light when we weren’t actually mid-rescue and there were no patients in need of treatment. I wasn’t a specialist in rightminding or in treating artificial persons—Sally was our AI MD—but I had the time on my hands, so I spent a fair amount of it talking to Helen.
At first, she ignored me. I knew she was aware of my presence, because Sally was also keeping tabs on her, and making herself available for conversation. (We existed, that whole flight, in an abundance of preparedness.) Helen seemed to find Sally stressful and weird, though, so Sally kept her presence light.
I preferred Helen’s silence to hearing her repeat her fixed ideations, at least, and I kept at it. And I could, with Sally’s guidance, help lay the foundation for the data docs when we arrived at home.
So I sat with her and chatted. At her more than with her, at first. With Sally’s assistance, I knew the right leading questions to ask, and if she didn’t answer, I could tune myself to be more patient than I had been made. I quizzed her on our human cargo, her crew. The crew she was so fiercely loyal to that she’d sealed them into boxes to save them from… herself? From the poisonous meme that had infected her? Or had she hived off the thing she called the machine in order to manage her own cognitive dissonance about saving her crew by freezing them?
I wasn’t even quite sure where to begin unpacking that.
Helen also seemed to look at me—inasmuch as an eyeless face can—and listen when I told her about white space, which I took to mean she was interested in the science. I might have tried to explain the physics, but I didn’t understand those, either. So I encouraged Helen to strike up a relationship with Loese, and while they talked I got my rest shift in.
Shipminds don’t sleep, you see. Even shipminds trapped in their peripherals, who have forgotten that they were ever shipminds to begin with.
Assuming that’s what Helen was.
Naturally, I was asleep when the first interesting thing happened. In my own bunk, for once, with Tsosie and Loese on shift for the time being. I didn’t stay asleep long, though, because the g forces woke me.