"No," said Tris. "What are you?"
"A C-class Niponshi yacht, registered to--"
"That's not what I asked," Tris said. "What are you?"
"Me?"
"That's what I said." She jacked the slide on a weapon Doc Joyce had lent her and pointed it at the control panel. They both knew she wouldn't fire. It was one thing to threaten to fry the yacht's circuits when it was tethered off the Chinese Rocks and quite another to shoot it up from inside while it was falling towards one of the 2023 worlds. Tris wasn't running some passive-aggressive adolescent suicide routine, the ship had already established this.
"You mean what form does my core take? My thinking bit," the yacht added, in case Tris found the technical term too difficult. "That's what you mean, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Tris, through gritted teeth. "That's exactly what I mean."
"I'm crystal," said the computer. "Some Class Cs still use bio-cores but mostly we've upgraded. Somehow even the highest quality organic matter always seems to degrade in the end. Crystal is--"
"I know about crystal," Tris said flatly. "I used to deal it when I was a kid."
"That's--"
"Technically illegal," agreed Tris. "Quite probably. But not where I come from."
"And where do you come from?"
Tris opened her mouth to answer and then shut it again. For all she knew this conversation was being recorded so the yacht could make a formal complaint after this was all over.
"You wouldn't," said Tris. "Would you?"
"Wouldn't what?" asked the ship.
"Make a complaint about being stolen."
"Oh," the ship said bitterly, "I'm not allowed--" And then it stopped, hurriedly swallowing the rest of its sentence.
"You're only semi," said Tris, suddenly understanding everything. "Not full at all."
"I might as well be," the yacht said, "given what I'm expected to do. There are fullAIs out there who can't do half--"
"So why are you still registered as semiAI?"
"Because he races," said the yacht. "And if I was fullAI then he couldn't enter for rough-class races, could he? And that's where the glory lies."
Tris couldn't see what glory there could be in hacking between worlds when everyone rich enough to race was more than rich enough to have themselves backed up before they started. Although "rich" was a negotiable term when it came to the 2023 worlds.
Every inhabitant was entitled to what they needed. It was just that a few always seemed to need more than others and so acquiring extra became a matter of convincing the Library that one really did need whatever it was one needed. The Library's decisions, however, were often counter-intuitive and according to Doc Joyce this crankiness was intentional, being designed to give people something to circumnavigate.
Sand in the oyster, he called it. Translated, this meant too much of everything created its own problems. So everyone got more than enough and then had to decide if this was too little. It sounded incredibly stupid to Tris but then Razor's Edge wasn't one of the 2023 worlds.
"Okay," said Tris, looking at a chrome and glass table in front of her, its top rather thicker than it needed to be. "This is how it's going to work." She ran her hand along one of the edges, looking for some catch that might release the panel, and realized she was showing her ignorance.
"Open," she told the glass and it did just that, raising like the lid of a box.
The table had fooled her at first, when she was busy persuading All Tomorrow's Parties that yes, it really did want to let her steal it. The top wasn't transparent at all, merely laminated with chameleon glass that reflected whatever it saw on the opposite side.
"You know, Tristesse," said the yacht, "I don't think this is a good idea."
The girl's shrug barely registered inside the leather jacket she'd found in a crew pod, its pockets stuffed with narcotics guaranteed to leave you looking happy and healthy, which seemed pretty skewed to Tris. If you took something that fucked your brain and then refused to walk you home afterwards, you wanted to look like you just took something that...
And if this item of clothing really had been grown to fit then Tris definitely didn't want to meet whoever owed Doc Joyce whatever it was they owed Doc Joyce. Come to that, Tris didn't much want to meet Doc Joyce again either.
"Everything's the wrong size," she told the yacht, and Tris was right. The overhead lockers were out of reach and the sloping chrome and leather chair next to the control table could have been a double bed. Even the tank of fish at her back stretched to twice Tris's height and contained three purple catfish at least as big as she was, with eyes which followed her every move.
She was beginning to realize that there might be another reason why the yacht kept treating her as a child.
"So what's going to happen to them?" Tris asked, nodding towards the wall of fish tanks. "I mean when we crash."
If the yacht could have shrugged it would have done so. Tris could tell from the lag it left between her question and its answer.
"They'll die," it said.
"Land in a lake."
"What?"
"Find a lake," Tris said. "Then land in it. Which bit of that don't you understand?"
"If I land in a lake," said the yacht, "then I'm going to die."
"You're not alive. You told me so yourself. A C-class semi. Do semiAIs qualify as sentient? I don't think so." She stuck her head further inside the newly opened table and followed what looked like a rainbow twisting together towards a blue light.
"What happens if I touch this?"
"We crash a little earlier than intended," said the yacht icily. And then it said nothing for a very long time unticlass="underline"
"Lake," said the ship.
Rocky cliffs rising on both sides and barren peaks, now higher than the ship, shrouded in mist and fringed with ice. Under them hung a fat nebula of cloud, mountainous with snow.
"Where?"
"Beneath that."
A strip of silver opened up and came closer as the yacht adjusted its vision to encompass sleet hammering into the water's surface and flattened waves sucking sullenly at a bank of fallen rock.
"Looks like a river to me." She'd never seen a river, of course. Come to that, she'd never seen a lake. The nearest RipJointShuts had to either was a storm drain that cut through the level like some ancient moat, too wide to jump and, according to Doc Joyce, so deep that no one had touched the bottom and come back to boast about it. But it was still a drain.
"River, lake... it's all soft," said the yacht.
"Well," said Tris as she traced the rainbow towards its end and found herself staring at a small sphere about the size of a marble. "That's probably true enough. Put us down when you can."
The yacht was silent.
"What?" demanded Tris.
"I should have arrested you," said the yacht.
"You can't," Tris said. "You haven't got the rights." She knew all about not having the rights. Doc Joyce lacked the rights to get relocated to a better level on Heliconid, which lacked the rights to be included as one of the 2023 worlds. By declaring Heliconid unfit for habitation the first Council of Ambassadors had guaranteed that those inhabiting it were assumed to have chosen their own wretched way of life.
"Put us down," Tris ordered.
"There is no us," said the yacht, but it dipped through the cloud all the same and settled into a holding pattern. If Tris hadn't known better she'd have sworn that its semiAI was plucking up courage. The first run took the yacht low over a wide strip of water and then the yacht went into a Möbius roll to skim the side of gorge, ending up exactly where it had started, staring down at the silver strip.