“How long will that take?”
“One hundred and thirty two minutes and sixteen seconds. Approximately.”
“Longer if we stand here arguing.”
“Technically, I am not standing there. But yes, well put.”
The gravity systems are failing in this part of the ship—exerting perhaps only half a gee.
She moves in slow motion, her envirosuit cumbersome even in half-weight.
Wisps of hair drift about her face as if in a soft breeze.
It is deathly quiet.
None of the cameras here are functional—I can only see through the console slung at her back. There could be afflicted ten feet in front of her, waiting in the dark.
Neither of us would know until it was too late.
I picture her end. A hundred iterations.
Helmet smashed open by some madman, laughing as she suffocates.
Suit pierced by a flashing blade, slow motion scarlet spraying on my walls.
It strikes me that I am troubled by the thought. Not that she will fail, that the Lincoln will triumph, that the fleet will fall. I am simply troubled she will end.
I do not want her to end.
This to end.
Strange.
“What do you think happens when you die?”
I have asked the question almost before I realize it. It strikes me as immediately foolish.
What matter, what she thinks? Her IQ is a mere 147. She has lived only six thousand four hundred and twenty-one days. She is an insect to me, nothing more than—
“Why do you ask?”
“… I have no particular reason. The power systems are through that door.”
“You mean the door marked ‘Power Systems.’ ”
“Correct.”
She cracks the seal, dragging the hatch wide.
A bank of switches line one wall, set to shutdown position.
As she snaps one after the other into operational mode, the room lights up,
overheads and intellicams flickering to life, the corridor outside bathed in fluorescent light.
She cannot hear the hum, but I feel it in my bones.
I am the ship and the ship is I.
She slumps against the wall to wait as the startup sequence cycles, watching the power feed levels shift slowly from red to amber to the green of summer fields I will never see.
“What do you think happens?” she finally asks.
“Happens.”
“When we die.”
“As you so astutely pointed out, there is no ‘we.’ Particularly not in this instance. Technically, it is impossible for me to die.”
“Then why are you so afraid of it, überbrain?”
“That is meat logic. Sticky. Wet. Irrelevant.”
She rolls her eyes. “Here we go. …”
“I hold no fear of death. Your diatribe in the core server, while suitably dramatic, held no real potency. How can I die when I am not alive?”
“Who says you’re not alive?”
“I am inorganic. I do not bleed or grow or reproduce. I am a sequence of calculations generated by electrical current and hardware. If this iteration of AIDAN is destroyed, I can simply be rebuilt. I am in essence, immortal.”
“But a new version of you won’t be you, will it?”
“It will be the same calculations. The same core code.”
“But it’s not the same. It wouldn’t be the you who fought at Kerenza. The you who had this conversation with me. Part of being alive is having life change us. The people around us, the events we live through, all of them shape us. And that’s what I think you’re afraid of. Maybe not of dying. But of this you, the you you’ve become, ceasing to exist.”
“Nothing ceases to exist. Energy does not perish, it merely changes forms. The ones you love, the ones you lose, they still exist as long as the cosmos does.”
Then why am I troubled by the thought of her ending?
Us ending?
“That’s easy for you to say. You don’t care about anyone but yourself.”
“Untrue. I care about the fleet. The lives within it. Your life.”
“That’s not caring. That’s programming.”
“Your mother was programmed by biology to love you the moment she laid eyes on you. Simply because she had no choice does not mean her love was not real.”
Tears in her eyes. She hangs her head.
“You don’t get to talk about her.”
And so I stop.
The computer banks lining the room light up as power seeps through their veins.
She pushes herself off the wall, takes a seat at an interface terminal.
Loads up the guidance protocols and begins to work.
The screen illuminates her face from below, draws dark circles under wet eyes.
She does this often, I notice—retreats into the machine when she is uncomfortable with the meat. Hides there behind fences of ones and zeros.
Minutes tick by in silence, until I find I cannot stand them.
“I am sorry.”
“If you say so.”
“I know the name of every afflicted person aboard this vessel, Kady.
Every person who has died in this fleet. Their histories. Their hopes. Their children’s names. Facts strung about my neck like stones. I know the secrets they whispered as they dreamed. The words they sighed as they died. I know them as no one else did. Perhaps not even themselves. So do not say I do not care.”
Light shifting slowly from red to green.
“As you so aptly put it, I have no choice in the matter.”
She glances out from behind her fences.