by Max Barry
That was maybe overselling it. That might have been the girl thinking, I wish stupid Talia Beanfield would go be an actor so I can make crew. But she was happy to be the big fish in the small pond of Camp Zero Life candidate roleplays. She had played piano as a kid and meant to make a career of it right up until she attended a state conference with approximately two hundred kids who had more talent and discipline and a fascination for music she found slightly frightening and which made her own interest seem, on reflection, more like a fondness for public approval and applause. So this was fine.
Especially fun were fraternization scenarios. These began in her second year, once they’d weeded out the candidates better suited to Intel or Weapons or, let’s be brutally honest, something far, far away from a Providence. They were kind of silly, because policy was clear enough: Don’t have sex on the ship. That seemed hard to get wrong. Of course, six months or so in, thirty trillion miles from home, it started to feel less clear. She had begun to have thoughts like, Fraternization, is it really so bad? and Would anyone even know? But she had a handle on it. It helped that her choices were limited to Anders and Gilly, who were, respectively, offensive and oblivious. Or maybe it really was the roleplays.
Hey, Oscar. I really enjoyed last night.
Me too, babe.
I was thinking, maybe you and me could hang out. Just talk, you know. Open up. Really get to know each other.
Uh, yeah, I don’t know, babe, I’ve got a long tasklist today . . . all these hydrate filters needing changing . . .
But Oscar, I already checked your tasklist. I can track your movements, you know. I can see every room you go into. I know you have nothing to do right now except spend time with me.
To be honest, I just want some space, Talia.
Space? There’s plenty of that outside, Oscar. Why don’t you take a little walk from the airlock, then? Get all the fucking space you want!
Can we stop? I’m not comfortable with this roleplay.
And . . . scene.
Good times. She actually enjoyed fraternization roleplays more than the real version. All she had in reality was a long-distance boyfriend who broke up with her approximately eight months before informing her about it, and a series of stilted relationships with other Life candidates. Two in a row had had erectile dysfunction. One, okay, but two, she couldn’t help feeling like that was on her. “Just don’t look at me,” he said, and she protested, because what were they doing here, and he confessed, “I feel like you’re always analyzing me.”
She got better at hiding that.
Being on the ship was performing all the time. It was roleplays around the clock. There was no conversation where she wasn’t noting tone and word choice and body language. That joke from Anders, how much of that was serious? Gilly’s gaze is drifting, does he need more mental stimulation? And as much as she enjoyed the work, it was exhausting. She would like, just for a minute, to hang out with someone she wasn’t responsible for. She would like to relax. Talk like a normal human being. That was the part she hadn’t thought through: She had gone into Life because she loved other people, yet gotten herself sent into space with only three of them.
Not a big deal. This was what she’d signed up for. Duty to protect humanity, etc.
But VZ was going to be hard.
* * *
—
“You fucked up,” Anders told her.
It was the day after Jackson dropped the news about VZ and Anders’s pants had followed. She was seeing Anders on a regular basis already and plainly that would have to continue. Right now he was draped across the sofa in Rec-2 because apparently he’d taken a nap in the middle of a day shift. He’d wanted to meet in his cabin but with Anders it was wise to maintain barriers.
“How?” she said. There was no table and she had to keep her arms folded, not something she normally did. She was usually open for business, physiologically speaking, like a good Life Officer.
“You told Gilly to hang with me instead of doing his duties. Now he’s wondering why you think his work doesn’t matter.”
“Oh,” she said. “Damn.” In the interests of crew health and morale, a certain key fact had been concealed from Intel Officer Gilly. For two years, she had been so good at keeping it.
“Just tell him the truth,” Anders said. “He’s a big boy. He can handle it.”
She shook her head. “No. It would be bad for him.” She eyed him. “Don’t you tell him, either.”
“You underestimate him. He’s smart.”
“I know he’s smart. But he needs the lie. Don’t take that away.”
Anders shrugged. She didn’t honestly expect him to understand. To the outside world, Anders was a self-assured, devilishly handsome man with unlikely bone structure and a delightfully roguish twist. In reality, he was mostly twist. About 70 percent of her job was dealing with him, which he lacked the self-awareness to realize. They’d told her back at Camp Zero: You will be the most important person on the ship and no one will know. It was so true. It was so true.
“Don’t do it,” she warned. “You’ll only drag him down to where you are.”
“Then I’ll have company.”
“You have company.” She tried to spread her arms. “I’m right here.”
“I’m kidding around, Beanfield,” Anders said. “I won’t tell him.”
“Don’t,” she said.
* * *
—
She had duties: interviews, messages, reports, and everything else that needed to get sent while they were still in range of a relay. Which was approximately thirty hours, according to Jackson, although that was only an estimate. If the ship detected hostiles nearby, they might spend a week floating around lighting up hives. If it sniffed something in the tilt of a frequency from a far-flung star, they could be inside VZ within an hour. As Gilly loved to explain, the ship was so much smarter than any of them, it was impossible to predict its decisions or even understand why it made them. Humans might not reach the same conclusions even if they studied the same data, because they had tiny wet meat brains instead of house-sized tanks of software writing more software. So who knew.
She felt like she had time, though. She felt like the ship was not quite as aloof as Gilly made out. The day they’d boarded, after all the ceremonies, the salutes, the tearful hugs with family, once everyone had shuttled off and the engines were warming, the ship had greeted them. Every screen, both tactile and virtual, had displayed:
HELLO
“Hello?” she’d replied. She was trained in the subsystems, but hadn’t known the ship did greetings. “This is Life Officer Talia Beanfield.”
The ship didn’t answer. She tracked down Gilly, who was doing something with a torque wrench in a corridor, a bunch of testing equipment scattered around. Talia was confident that nothing on this ship needed the application of a torque wrench ten hours before launch. That would imply a fairly colossal fuckup in the preflight checks. But if it kept Gilly happy, fine. She pointed at the nearest HELLO. “Are you seeing this?”
“It’s a default message,” Gilly said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It’s nice,” she said. “It’s pleased to meet us.”
He tilted his head to one side. She would come to know this gesture well over the next two years: Gilly mentally ratcheting his intelligence down until he found a level he could share with her. “The ship isn’t alive. It can’t communicate with us.”
“But it is communicating,” she said.
He shook his head. “This is software that wrote itself. It has a completely alien way of thinking, which can’t be translated into any human language. It doesn’t even really know we’re here. It would be like you trying to communicate to your white blood cells that you want them to fight an infection: Even if you could somehow physically talk, there’s no overlap in how you convey meaning or understand mo
tivations. You frame concepts in totally different ways.”
“Then where did the ‘hello’ come from?”
He shrugged. “Someone programmed it, maybe. Or else it really is similar to how you communicate with your white blood cells: via a process that’s so far beneath conscious thought, you’re not even aware of it.”
She smiled, because she did enjoy Gilly’s dorky explanations, and it was important that he feel understood. If she seemed confused, he would become anxious and throw words at her brain until she faked it. “Well, I like it.” She reached out and touched a HELLO. It was nice, she thought, even if Gilly was right and the ship wasn’t really talking. She didn’t know her white blood cells, not as individuals, but she was grateful for whatever work they did. She wished them well and cared that they remained unharmed. If that was similar to how the ship felt about its crew, she was happy. She liked that just fine. “Hello, ship,” she said.
Gilly looked at her like she was crazy. “It’s just a message.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. Obviously it was just a message. Obviously messages were for exchanging bare, dry facts. There had never in history been a message that conveyed more than its most literal interpretation. “I get it.”
* * *
—
Speaking of messages, she had a few from her sister and her parents, but she dutifully deprioritized these in case she lost the relay. It was more important to file clips for her feed. She combined the latter with a workout, pedaling at 120 revolutions per minute, a white towel draped across her shoulders, narrating to camera about the burn in her calves, which she related only slightly tortuously to the fight for galactic supremacy. “I think there’s a fight in each of us,” she said, pedaling. “If you’re back home, pushing your bike, or lugging groceries, or sweating your job, you’re fighting. And that fight connects us. I know I keep saying it, but I don’t feel alone out here because I know you’re with me. I’m carrying your fight, our fight, out there.” Then she said good-bye for six months, or however long it turned out to be. And it was honestly emotional, because she would miss them, her followers, who sent her messages like I love you! and Keep kicking salamander ass! and How do you do your eyes, they’re so beautiful. Oh, how she would miss Feed Talia.
The process left her drained and she granted herself a brief nap before resuming her tasks. But when she woke, she could feel something was different. She applied her film and pinged the relay and it came back with NO CONNECTION. It had happened. They were in VZ.
* * *
—
Three days later, they had an engagement. The walls flushed orange; the klaxon sounded; she scrambled to station. Her place was on A Deck, up at the top of the ship, which she liked as a concept. There was no view; it was a hardened room with a harness and a bunch of screens, the same as any station. But it was fun to imagine herself up top, a puppet master, strings dangling to the three below. Because that was what she was doing: monitoring Jackson, Anders, and Gilly. All the garbage she called in about thermals and desats during an engagement, that didn’t matter at all. Nothing could go wrong with any of that. The crew were a different story.
The harness curled around her, holding her tight. She quite enjoyed that, too. It was like getting a hug from the ship. “Life, checking in.”
Jackson: “Welcome, Life.”
Gilly: “Intel, checking in. All green.”
“Anders?”
“Yeah.”
“Where are you?”
“C Deck. Give me a minute. I’m coming.”
“Can you go live on ping, please?”
“Sure. Sorry. We were playing ninja stars.” On Talia’s film, Anders’s name brightened. He was near Medical, she noticed. He and Gilly had found some new game that caused them to require trips there. She filed that away for further attention: Anders: Deliberately seeking self-harm? He had an addictive personality; he could get hooked on almost anything.
Jackson: “Getting our first look at VZ hostiles. One ring, six hives. Lot of traffic. Maybe five hundred soldiers in flight.”
Gilly: “Any fliers?”
Jackson: “Negative.”
Over comms: Anders breathing. Huh, huh, huh.
She said, “You all right, Anders?”
“Yeah. Head hurts. Almost at station.”
Concussion? Hangover? Tumor? She would review his medicals.
“Hurry,” said Jackson. “Contact in sixty seconds. It would be nice to have weapons. Intel, what am I seeing in Armor? It looks low.”
“We’re undercharging. Not a problem. Lots of spare capacitance.”
“We’ll have full armor in sixty?”
“Before that. In thirty.”
“Thank you. Life? How are we looking?”
“We’re looking beautiful,” she said.
“Hives discharging,” Jackson said. “Eight hundred in flight. A thousand. Twelve hundred.”
“How big are these hives?” Gilly asked.
“Standard. Eighty yards across. But take your point. It’s more than we usually see from this kind of cluster.”
“It’s a lot more.”
“Topping out at sixteen hundred. Yes. It’s a lot more.”
“Intel,” Talia said. “You’ve been running swarm analysis. Anything unusual in their behavior?”
“It’s too early to tell. We’ll find out if they turn.” He sounded pleased to be asked, so, mission accomplished.
Jackson: “Contact in twenty seconds. Anders?”
“Weapons, checking in.”
“Thank you. How does it look?”
“Pulse ready. Laser batteries . . . have not deployed.”
“We’re going in with just the pulse?”
“Yep.”
“You want to figure out why?”
“Roger.” The ship deployed weapons based on its situational assessment, which was often too complex and fast-moving to follow. But Anders was supposed to be across it.
“Hostiles converging,” Jackson said. “There’s the turn. Contact in five.”
“First turn,” Gilly said.
“We’re in range. Weapons, why aren’t we pulsing?”
Anders: “Uh . . .”
“Hostiles turned again. Same as last time. They’re spreading out again.”
Gilly: “Same tactic.”
“And here they come again. Third turn.”
“Pulsing,” Anders said.
“Thank you, Weapons. That was a good one. Caught them on the bubble. Four hundred down.”
Gilly: “Oh, that’s good. We anticipated their turn this time. Outsmarted them.”
Anders: “Pulse ready in ten.”
“Clever ship,” Gilly said. “Very clever ship.”
Jackson: “Hives are breaking formation. Leaving the ring.”
“We hit them?”
“No. Think they’re leaving.”
Anders: “Pulsing.”
“Acknowledge. That got a lot of them. Five hundred remaining. Four hundred. Debris is cascading. Three hundred.”
Gilly: “Still all soldiers?”
“So far. There may be some we haven’t picked up. Hives outputting a whole mess of spores. Doesn’t matter. Tracking is stable. Weapons, we’re still going pulse-only here?”
“Affirmative. Next pulse in eight seconds.”
“Incoming fire,” Jackson said. “Two hundred in huk range.”
“Again, just soldiers?” Gilly said.
“Correct.”
“Pulsing.”
“Huks destroyed. Soldiers destroyed. No hostiles in flight. Looks like we got them all.”
Talia said, “That puts us over half a million mission kills, yes?”
“Oh, yes, just,” said Gilly. “That’s a milestone.”
Jackson: “Contact w
ith hives in ten seconds.”
“How many do we need to overtake Fire of Montana?”
“Another four hundred thousand, at least,” Gilly said. “We need a lot more hives.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Personally, she didn’t much care how many confirmed kills anyone had. It was mainly a goal to keep them on task.
“That was more salamanders than normal, though. Target density seems to improve as we get deeper.”
“Speaking of which,” Jackson said. “We just crisped the hives, correct, Weapons?”
“Yep.”
“Please continue to call in until the end of the engagement.”
“Roger that.”
“Zero hostiles. Zero structures. Debris is scan-clear. Engagement complete.”
“Logging it,” Gilly said.
“Congratulations,” said Jackson. “You have now survived combat in VZ.”
“Is there a medal for that?” Talia said.
“Yes,” Jackson said. “They mail it out to you.”
“Huh,” Gilly said. “So this is what VZ feels like.”
“What does it feel like?” Talia said.
“Different. I dunno. I guess it’s not, logically. But it feels different. Don’t you think?”
“Yes,” she said, validating his feelings. “There’s something about it.”
“Feels like the same old shit to me,” Anders said. “We sit around holding our dicks while the ship takes care of business.”
“Don’t be gross, Anders,” she said, reaffirming boundaries.
“That’s enough,” Jackson said. “Engagement closed.”
* * *
—
She caught Anders before he could make it back to his cabin. “What’s wrong with you?”
He squinted at her. It had been a long time since Anders had had a haircut, and she wasn’t a fan of his beardy look, which had progressed from rugged survivalist to grizzled homeless. Even though they couldn’t send clips home, they were supposed to still be recording them, so this wasn’t ideal. “What?” he said.