When you spend as much time on a ship as I do, you get to know its moods and sensations. I surfaced from dreams of eating lunch with my daughter back planetside to the hazy awareness that Sally had fallen out of white space and was dropping v, my internal organs sloshing to the side in a slightly uncomfortable fashion. Ordinarily, I might have turned over under the net and gone back to sleep. But, down the corridor, I could hear people in ops, talking.
I slithered out of bed and didn’t bother with slippers. My pajamas shushed around my ankles as I padded under light gravity toward the command module. Rhym was there, and Camphvis stretched out in her acceleration couch, alert eyestalks the only indication that she was conscious.
A glance at the scans showed me that we’d dropped out of white space at a mass in order to change vectors, pick up a beacon, and dump some v. There was a star nearby, a red giant whose dim glow and massive size let us see details of the atmosphere.
And Rhym and Sally were talking to someone. It was Sally’s voice, mellow and carrying, that I had heard in my half-awake state and followed.
“…Singer, copy,” Sally was finishing.
Another ship’s voice answered her: this one a human-sounding tenor, without the tinny ring of translation. Another ox ship, then, and another at-least-partially human-crewed ox ship. “Sally, glad to run across you. And thank you for the updated sitrep. Anything else you’d like us to know?”
“Negative,” she responded. “Good fortune on your journeys and with your investigations.”
“Good fortune on yours,” the other ship responded. “My crew extends wishes that you return home safely, and that your patients thrive. Singer out.”
I settled on my couch and leaned over to Camphvis. “Who’s that?”
“Somebody famous!” she answered, brow tufts quivering with delight.
Rhym leaned about half of their feathery tendrils in our direction. “That is the shipmind of I Rise From Ancestral Night. They’re ferrying our archinformists!”
Even translation couldn’t flatten the excitement in their voice. Senso normally provided context, but Rhym and I had worked together so long now that we could read each other’s moods pretty well, even across a nonmorphologically aligned species barrier. And I understood why everybody was so thrilled. This was the ship that had recently been discovered parked in stasis near the Saga-star itself. We’d had some of her crew at the hospital for a while after that adventure—and not in the best of shape, or so I’d heard.
“Apparently,” said Sally, “the archinformists were all already on board, so it was easy to divert them here.”
Well, naturally. Where else would you find a lot of archaeologists but at the galaxy’s most interesting archaeological site?
The next dia’s session with Helen started off like every other so far. After I ate, I took my second bulb of tea over to where Helen was floating, out of the way against the aft bulkhead. I mourned my lack of coffee. There was one place—one—on Core General where humans could go for the devil bean. Its air was scrubbed before recirculating and you had to rinse your mouth out with wash before leaving.
I understand. I do understand. The Sneckethans eat nothing but rancid space fish, and we make them use their own cafeteria also. They’re pretty good sports about it, so the least humans can do is be good sports about coffee. The smell of tea doesn’t inspire the same hatred in our fellow sentients, and I’ve gotten used to it. I come from a coffee-drinking settlement, though. We even grew it onworld, for consumption and export. Suitably isolated from the local biosphere, naturally.
I do think it’s ironic that the root meaning of cafeteria is “place to get coffee.”
But I digress. I sat myself beside Helen and settled in.
That was when Dia 25 started to differ from Diar 1, 2, 3, and 4, et cetera. I almost dropped my tea when Helen acknowledged me at once, brightly. “Hello, Dr. Jens! Can I make your day more complete?”
Day, I noticed. Not dia. She really was from a long time ago.
I felt safe beside her. Sally had an override on her programs by then, and had installed a governor. That’s not as oppressive as it sounds. Helen still had free will and consciousness. It was just that if she tried to think about taking violent action against Sally or her crew… she wouldn’t be able to. Sally assured me that Helen’s program was very primitive, by artificial intelligence standards, and that she—Sally—wasn’t at all worried about her ability to control Helen. She’d written herself a routine to do nothing but monitor Helen and the microbots, which she was still keeping quiescent.
“Actually, I came to talk,” I said. “I thought you might be lonely.”
I might have been learning to read the non-expressions on her not-quite-a-face. It seemed that her demeanor lightened. “What would you like to talk about?”
Helen looked up, as if glancing at the ceiling. As if looking for Sally up there. I could read it as nervousness, which led me to swallow a flash of unproductive anger as I thought about the engineer who must have programmed that fragile little gesture of performative subservience into her.
That engineer was possibly frozen in a coffin a couple of meters away, neither determinately alive nor dead until we thawed him out. Schrödinger’s engineer.
Pity calmed me a little without my having to tune.
“What would you like to talk about?” I asked. “I’m tasked to help you assimilate, after all.”
“That other doctor who speaks to me sometimes. It’s an artificial person?” She seemed overawed.
“Sally? Yes. Sally is the ship. She’s an artificial intelligence. A… yes, I suppose you could call her a created person.”
“And she’s allowed to be a doctor?”
“She’s allowed to be anything she wants to be,” I said. “Or nothing at all, if that’s what she prefers, though I have yet to meet an AI that didn’t get bored if it wasn’t taking on four or five challenging careers simultaneously. They have to pay off their creation, and all Synizens are required to perform a certain amount of government service if their skills are needed. But yes, she’s a pilot, and an astrogator, and a doctor. One of the best doctors I’ve ever met.”
Helen seemed to pause for a long time. It was unusual for an artificial intelligence to take long enough to process something for a human to notice it. With most AIs, I would assume that she was giving me a moment to catch up, or waiting to see if my electrical signals needed a little extra time to feel their way through all that meat. Some of the more social AIs built lag time into their communication so we felt more at home and could get a word in edgewise. With Helen, damaged and primitive as she seemed, I thought she might actually lag that hard.
Helen said, “You say she. Does she have a body somewhere?”
“A peripheral? Not to the best of my knowledge, though a lot of AIs use them. It can be useful to have hands. Some operate waldos, though. Especially surgeons.” I laughed. “And shipminds.”
Helen was looking at me. Just looking. Well, inasmuch as someone without eyes can look. “Are you a created intelligence?”
I spluttered. “No, I’m made of meat, I’m afraid. I was grown in the traditional human way, by combining zygotes in a nutrient bath. Did you think I was a peripheral?”
“I thought—” She reached out and touched my exo with one resilient silver fingertip. It was inobvious, matched to my skin tone, resilient and flexible… but it was still an armature supporting my entire body. I guess I should have expected her to notice.