“They knew that. They didn’t have any other options left. They’d tried everything.”
Lovelace felt a burst of compassion for the two Humans sitting in the cargo bay. She zoomed in on their faces. Their eyes were red and swollen, the skin beneath them almost bruised. Poor things hadn’t slept in days.
“Thank you,” Lovelace said. “I know it wasn’t me they were working on, exactly, but I’m very touched.”
Pepper smiled. “I’ll pass that along.”
“Can I talk to them?” Lovelace knew she could talk to anyone on the ship through the voxes, but given their behavior, she had thought it best to sit quietly until they made the first move. She might know their names and jobs, but they were strangers, after all. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
“Lovelace, there are some things that you need to understand. They’re messy things, and I hate to throw all of this at you after you’ve just woken up. But there’s some big stuff going on here.”
“I’m listening.”
The woman sighed and ran her hand over her smooth head. “Your previous installation—they called her Lovey—was… close to Jenks. They’d been together for years, and they got to know each other very well. They fell in love.”
“Oh.” Lovelace was surprised by this. New as she was, she had a pretty good idea of how she functioned and what tasks she would be expected to perform. Falling in love hadn’t been an eventuality she’d thought to consider. She ran through everything she knew about love in her behavioral reference files. She focused back on the man weeping in the cargo bay. She ran through the files on grief as well. “Oh, no. Oh, that poor man.” Sadness and guilt flooded her synaptic pathways. “He knows I’m not Lovey, right? He knows that her personality developed the way that it did as a result of years of interpersonal experiences that can’t be duplicated, right?”
“Jenks is a comp tech. He knows the drill. But right now, he’s hurting bad. He’s just lost the most important person in the world to him, and we Humans can get awful messed up when we’ve lost someone. He might start to think that he can get her back. I don’t know.”
“I might become a close approximation,” Lovelace said, feeling nervous. “But—”
“No, Lovelace, no, no. That wouldn’t be fair to you, or healthy for him. What Jenks needs is to grieve and move on. And that’s going to be really hard for him to do with your voice coming through the voxes every day.”
“Oh.” Lovelace could see where this was going. “You want to uninstall me.” She did not have the same primal fear of oblivion that organic sapients did, but after being awake for two and a quarter hours—two and a half, now—the idea of being switched off was an unsettling one. She rather liked being self-aware. She’d already taught herself to play flash, and she was only halfway through studying the history of Human development.
Pepper looked surprised. “What? Oh, no, shit, sorry, that’s not what I meant at all. Nobody’s going to uninstall you. We’re not going to kill you just because you’re not the same as the previous installation.”
Lovelace thought of the words Pepper had been using toward her. Person. Kill. “You think of me as a sapient, don’t you? Like you would an organic individual.”
“Uh, yeah, of course I do. You’ve got as much right to exist as I do.” Pepper cocked her head. “Y’know, we’re kind of alike, you and me. I come from a place where I wasn’t considered to be worth as much as the genetweaks running the show. I was a lesser person, only good for hard labor and cleaning up messes. But I’m more than that. I’m worth as much as anyone—no more, no less. I deserve to be here. And so do you.”
“Thank you, Pepper.”
“That’s not something you should have to thank me for.” Pepper slid down into the pit and put her hand against the core. “This next part is pretty heavy. It’s a choice. And it’s entirely up to you.”
“Okay.”
“A while back, Jenks put down an advance payment for a body kit. For Lovey.”
The reference file popped up. “That’s illegal.”
“Yes. Jenks didn’t care. At least, not at first. He and Lovey wanted something more than what they had. He wanted to take her out into the galaxy with him.”
“He must have loved her very much.” Lovelace wondered if anyone would ever feel the same about her. She imagined it would be nice.
Pepper nodded. “He changed his mind, though. Told me just to hang onto the kit for him, keep it safe.”
“Why?”
“Because he loved her too much to want to risk getting caught.” She smirked. “And perhaps because I had warned him against it. Though that may just be my ego talking.”
“Why had you warned him against it?”
“Creating new life is always dangerous. It can be done safely, but Jenks was thinking with his heart, rather than his head. I love the guy, but between you and me, I didn’t trust him to be smart about it.”
“That seems fair.”
“Trouble is, I now have a brand new, custom-built body kit tucked away in the back of my shop, and I’ve got no use for it.”
“Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Why?”
“Well, it being illegal, and all.”
Pepper gave a hearty laugh. “Sweetie, I’ve pulled myself out of the sort of trouble that would make a body kit bust look like a picnic. The law is not my concern, especially not where I live.”
“Where’s that?”
“Port Coriol.”
Lovelace accessed the file. “Ah. A neutral planet. Yes, I’m sure that gives you a little more breathing room.”
“Definitely. So here’s my proposal. And again, it’s entirely up to you. The way I see it, you deserve to exist, and Jenks needs to not be surrounded by reminders of Lovey. He needs to come to terms with this. Seeing as how I have a perfectly good body kit gathering dust, I think we could kill two birds with one stone.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“I’m giving you the option of coming with me. This is about what you want, not what I want.”
Lovelace considered this. She was already accustomed to the feel of the ship, the way her awareness could spread through its circuits. How would a body kit feel? What would it be like to have a consciousness that resided not within a ship full of people, but within a platform that belonged only to her? It was an intriguing idea, but terrifying, too. “Where would I go after I was transferred into the kit?”
“Wherever you like. But I’d suggest staying with me. I can keep you safe. And besides, I could really use an assistant. I run a scrap shop. Used tech, fix-it jobs, that kind of thing. I could teach you. You’d be paid, of course, and there’s a room in my home you could have. Me and my partner are pretty easy to get along with, and we liked your previous installation a lot. And you could leave anytime you like. You’d be under no obligation to me.”
“You’re offering me a job. A body, a home, and a job.”
“Have I blown your mind a bit?”
“What you’re suggesting is a very different sort of existence than what I’ve been designed for.”
“Yeah, I know. Like I said, it’s heavy. And you can stay here if you want to. None of the crew have suggested uninstalling you. Jenks would never let that happen anyway. And I may be wrong. He may be able to handle working with you. You two could become friends all over again. Maybe more. I just don’t know.”
Lovelace’s thoughts were racing. She’d diverted most of her processing power to exploring this one possibility. She really hoped that no asteroids popped up anytime soon. “What about what you warned Jenks about? About creating new life?”
“What about it?”
“Why is it okay for you and not for him?”