by Max Barry
“Why do we want to arrive at the same decisions?”
Gilly struggled for a response. “Because . . .”
“I’m just talking it through,” Jackson said.
“Because before Providences, people used to die a lot,” Gilly said. “Now they don’t. Are we really going to question the effectiveness of AI decisions? That’s . . . Everything we do is founded on that.”
“What’s second of all?”
“Second of all, some of the systems you’re talking about, like Weapons Targeting, are flat-out beyond human capability. We’re aiming at small, fast-moving targets thousands of miles away. Our hit rate would be near zero.”
Anders said, “What’s the computer’s hit rate?”
“You should fucking know that,” Gilly said. “It’s a hundred percent.”
Anders shook his head. “Wrong.”
“I’m rounding. It’s effectively a hundred.”
“It’s less than a hundred.”
“I’m getting aggravated,” Gilly said, “because it feels like you’re saying that since it’s not perfect, it might as well be near zero.”
“When the AI goes down, the hit rate is zero,” Anders said. “Not near zero. Actual zero.”
Gilly took a breath. “Third of all, I don’t even want to imagine what happens if the ship discovers that we’ve rendered its weapons systems inoperable. It’s not going to sit there and rely on us to peashoot hostiles. It’ll try to route around the problem in ways we can’t predict.”
“Hmm,” Jackson said.
“Fourth of all, some systems can’t be run manually. At all.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Jackson said. “If it’s impossible, open with that.”
“Which systems?” Anders said.
“Anything that requires coordination between multiple subsystems. The laser matrix. The mass projectors. The plasma planet-killer. The engines you can only enable or disable, not maneuver.”
“What about the pulse?”
He hesitated.
“That sounds like yes,” Anders said.
“We could probably pulse,” Gilly admitted. “But I’d have to detach it from the ship’s control. Which would be idiotic, for the reasons I mentioned.”
Jackson said, “Can you set it up so that if we lose the AI, we have the option of asserting manual control?”
He screwed up his face. “Not easily.”
“But you could?”
“I can look into it.”
“Look into it,” Jackson said.
“I don’t mind going down fighting,” Anders said. “But I don’t want to be sitting in the dark with no weapons while they’re swarming the ship.”
“That won’t happen,” Gilly said. “It was one in a million, and the ship already learned from it. I’m not just saying this because I’m Surplex. This is the way it works.”
Jackson glanced at Talia. This was about as long as Talia could detach from a conversation before it became weird, she presumed. She replayed the last three sentences in her head and reached for a sunny platitude.
But something about Anders plucked at her attention. She had thought he was doing his usual Anders thing—being kind of a dick while seeking out the most potentially dangerous outcome for everyone—but his arms were folded tight, his legs crossed, and he was leaning back in his seat. All of this was such a classic fear reaction that it momentarily struck her dumb. Why was Anders scared?
“I hope that’s true,” Jackson said. “But I want a plan B if the shit hits the fan again.”
The confinement? He had exhibited an extreme reaction to it in the first place. Now that he was out, he was behaving like an abused child. This implied that he didn’t want to be sent back. He was terrified of being sent back.
Oh, God, she thought suddenly. Anders is claustrophobic.
It was preposterous. That was why she’d never figured it out. It was the last place in the universe she’d expect to find a claustrophobe. He had known what it would be like, yes? He had realized the corridors would be small? But it was true. She knew immediately that she was right.
You are Life Officer on a warship two years from home and one of your crew is claustrophobic. Go.
“That’s reasonable,” Gilly said. “Let me think on it.”
“Good enough for now,” Jackson said, and Gilly nodded.
She stared at Anders. Why, she thought. Why.
* * *
—
She couldn’t talk to the ship anymore. It felt like they were having a fight. The silence between them became a palpable thing and it was so ridiculous, because the ship was an inanimate object, or, at best, a creature with which she could never communicate. But still, she felt abandoned. She was shaken and post-trauma with no one to talk to and at a complete loss as to what to do about Anders. At the end of her shift, she wound up in Rec-1, trying to print pancakes. But when they came out, she couldn’t eat them, because they were too beautiful.
“You dealing?” said Jackson, materializing out of nowhere.
“Hmm, with what?” she said, wiping her nose. She adjusted the pancakes. Jackson. She did not need Jackson right now.
There was a short silence. “Let’s talk.”
She sensed reluctance and so could deduce what kind of talk this would be: It would be Jackson pretending she wanted to hear Talia’s private thoughts and fears while judging her mercilessly for every one of them. “No, I’m good. Thank you.” She turned and gave a smile, a bright one that said, Aren’t you sweet and This is the end of the conversation.
Jackson didn’t move. “I know what it’s like to be close.”
For a moment, Talia honestly didn’t know what she meant. Close to what? But: death, of course. Jackson had been close to the cold and the dark. And she was regarding Talia with something that looked like genuine understanding, and Talia closed her eyes to not see it but it was too late. She turned away. A noise popped out of her that was part hiccup and part sob. “Oh, God,” she said, mortified.
“Come,” Jackson said.
“I’m fine,” she protested, but she let Jackson lead her away from her pancakes. They went to Jackson’s cabin, also a surprise; Talia had never been there and never expected to. Beside the bed was a picture of Jackson’s husband in a collared shirt, smiling in dappled sunshine, a little cottage behind him.
“His collar is askew,” Jackson said. “I want to reach in there and fix it.”
Talia nodded. She had seen this picture in the background of Jackson’s clips and always suspected it was something of a prop.
“Sit,” said Jackson, gesturing at the bed and pulling out a metal chair for herself. “Talk.”
She sat. She wanted to. But Jackson’s back was ramrod straight and her perfect posture was a reminder that Jackson would never put herself in Talia’s position, not in a million years. There were no circumstances in which Jolene Jackson would sit on a bed and blub about her feelings. “Honestly, I’m just having a moment. I’m okay.”
Jackson eyed her. “So it’s like that.” She rose, moved to a drawer, and came back with a metal cup and a dark vial. She sat and began to pour it out. “I only have one cup, so we share.”
Talia accepted the cup. The liquid smelled sharp and rich. “Are you supposed to have this?”
Jackson said nothing.
“Scandalous,” Talia said. She tipped up the cup and fluid slid down her throat and lit her insides on fire. “Oh my God.”
Jackson took the cup, poured a measure for herself, and threw it back.
“Well,” Talia said. “Now I know what you do with your spare time.”
“Oh, no. This is just for emergencies.” Jackson poured another cup and offered it to Talia. “What I do in my downtime is write.”
She rolled the cup between her hands. Her throat burned. “W
rite what?”
“Letters,” Jackson said. “To my husband. Ask me how many.”
“How many?”
“Seven hundred and twelve. One for each day we’ve been out here.”
She blinked. “Jackson, that’s a stupid amount of letters.”
“Yup,” said Jackson.
“Why don’t you send him clips?”
Jackson sat back. “I don’t know. In a clip, I feel watched. Like I need to perform. I doubt you’d understand.”
“No, I get that.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed,” said Jackson. “You’re very natural.” There was a pause, during which Talia resisted the urge to confess that her whole life was a performance, Jolene, all of it. There was no time when she didn’t feel watched. “I don’t send them.”
“Pardon?” Talia said.
“The letters. They’re just for me.”
“You’ve written seven hundred letters to your husband but not sent them?”
Jackson nodded.
She laughed before she could stop herself. “Why?”
Jackson shrugged. “I never seem able to say it right.” The corners of her mouth tugged.
Talia covered her mouth. “That’s terrible.”
“Is it?”
“This conversation never happened,” Talia said, “because if I reported that to Operations, it would set off so many red flags, you have no idea.”
“Deal,” said Jackson, and they drank, one after the other. When the cup was refilled, she said, “Why did you come out here?”
“What?”
“What brought you to this ass-end of nowhere,” Jackson said. “And don’t give me the prepared answer.”
She stared. There was a hot tingle at the back of her brain. “I don’t know.” Suddenly she felt sad. “I think I made a mistake.”
“Drink,” said Jackson.
She obeyed. “I thought it was important. I thought we’d be safe. I thought people would respect me.”
“I respect you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Well, you’re growing on me.”
Talia snickered. “I always thought you hated your husband,” she confessed. “I thought you wanted to get away from him.”
Jackson looked shocked. “No, no. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry for thinking you were an empty-headed waste of space.”
Talia gasped. “I knew it. You’re not as good at hiding your feelings as you think, you shitty simulacrum of a human being.”
“Drink,” said Jackson.
She obeyed. The liquid burned less, going down easier.
“I hate Service,” Jackson said. “I hate all of it. And I hate the people who aren’t in Service, too. I don’t know which I hate more: Service or civilians.”
“In month seven,” Talia said, “I was so lonely, I started to fantasize about Anders.”
“Well, now,” Jackson said. “That’s understandable.”
“He’s so pretty,” Talia said. “But such an asshole.”
“He’s a toddler. I can’t watch him eat.”
She leaned forward. “Me too. That’s the worst part.” She exhaled. Now that someone was listening, she couldn’t stop talking. “I feel like I’m suffocating out here. As if I died the day we left but I didn’t notice and I can’t figure out why I’m not breathing.”
“We were fools, letting them ship us out.”
“We were,” she said. “We were so dumb.”
“I even knew before I left,” Jackson said. “But I did it anyway.”
“I just wanted to be good at something,” Talia said.
Jackson patted her own leg like she wanted to make a point. “You shouldn’t have tried to do this alone. We’re a team.”
“Yes.” She knew that now. “You’re right.”
“I miss my husband,” Jackson said, and, shockingly, began to cry. For a second, the sheer implausibility of the moment left Talia frozen. Then she moved to Jackson and put her arms around her.
“It’s okay,” Talia said. “We’ll be okay.”
* * *
—
They drank and talked more and when Talia couldn’t stand straight, Jackson said she could sleep in her bed. This was such an exciting idea that Talia accepted, even though she probably could have made it to her own cabin. She snuggled into Jackson’s sheets and inhaled her smell and it felt like she had crawled all the way into Jackson’s life. She fell asleep happy.
At some point she became aware of Jackson making an extraction, zipping up her flight jacket. She looked yellow in the glowlights. Talia raised her head.
“Stay, if you want,” said Jackson.
“Mmm.” She did want to stay. She wanted to talk some more. There was so much to discuss now that she’d found a door into Jackson’s brain. “Where are you going?”
Jackson nodded in the general direction of the rest of the ship.
Ah, Talia thought. I see.
Jackson left. Talia rolled over and hugged the pillow and closed her eyes. But she couldn’t forget where she was, and opened them again. She wondered whether Jackson had run away or if she genuinely had something to do. She could actually check that, if she wanted.
Hey, Jolene, I really enjoyed our talk last night.
Yes, me too, Beanfield.
I thought maybe you and me could hang out, watch a movie. Or just talk. Do you have any more to drink? I feel like we have a lot more to explore.
Actually, I have a busy roster today, Beanfield. I’m on a tight schedule.
But Jolene, you have all that time to write letters. And I can see your schedule. I can track your movements. I can see where you are every moment.
She stayed in the cabin for five hours. At a certain point she realized she was being obnoxious; she was deliberately testing Jackson, and both of them would know it. But she stayed anyway until she finally saw Jackson heading back on ping. When the door slid back, it became clear that Jackson had been monitoring Talia’s ping as well, because she was wearing her captain face, the one that betrayed nothing.
“Hi,” Talia said.
Jackson pressed the tactile panel to close the door. There was a silence. “It’s time for you to go.”
So blunt. So Jackson. “Okay.”
Jackson had clearly expected a fight. But it had been five hours, which was plenty of time for Talia to run roleplays in her head and prepare responses. “You’re a good soldier,” Jackson said.
“What?” she said, because this one she hadn’t anticipated.
“You’re a good soldier.”
“Oh,” she said. “Thank you.” But this annoyed her. Talia was a bad soldier. They both knew that. Was that not the conclusion they’d reached? That they were failing, but that was okay? Wasn’t that the comfort Jackson was offering? Now she was turning it into a lie.
“We still have roles,” Jackson said. “I don’t want to become dysfunctional.”
“Why would we become dysfunctional?” she said breezily, and Jackson looked disappointed, and that was that. But almost as soon as Talia had left, she answered her own question. It had always felt a little overdone to Talia how Jackson walked around like she couldn’t afford to crack a smile in case that was the moment the salamanders attacked, but she’d swallowed that because Jackson was captain, so, sure, why not go ahead and play the part? Clearly she was a piece of stunt casting designed to boost public sentiment and couldn’t even coordinate her resource builders in Gamma Fleet, but fine, whatever. Now, though, she knew Jackson agreed with her. She shouldn’t be here. None of them should.
She was alone again. “Somebody get me off this ship,” she muttered. It became a thing she repeated to keep herself sane. She didn’t mean it, of course.
There was no off the ship. It was just a mantra. Please, somebody, she thought. Get me off this ship.
7
[Gilly]
THE CASUALTY
It took two days for the ship to rebuild Materials Fabrication as if it had never been damaged. It had been; it had been shredded by huks and spun off into space in bite-size pieces. Gilly double-checked that, because when he ran his board and saw it reporting as online and fully functional, he wondered if the ship was failing to diagnose faults again. He climbed to B Deck and the blast doors stood open and the corridor beyond was almost entirely the burnished yellow of new metal. He explored for a few minutes and developed a strange feeling, a kind of nervousness, because everything was the same but also not. He retreated to his cabin to watch again how it had been destroyed.
How the huks had affected the ship was interesting: In many cases, they’d passed through a room where everything was nailed down and left barely any trace but a couple of holes in the walls. Other times, the huks had dragged every loose object into the air, shredded them, and sprayed the pieces like confetti. And if the path of a huk came close enough to a long section of metal, a wall or pipe or floor or whatever, it would unpeel it like a banana and trail a deadly cloudburst of globular shrapnel. This had happened in Materials Fabrication, which had been struck often and badly.
He pulled footage of the rebuild and watched somewhere in the order of ten thousand crabs crawling around, knitting hull. The ship hadn’t had ten thousand crabs earlier, Gilly was sure. It must have manufactured more. And then the crabs had manufactured more ship.
He sat back. It was what was supposed to happen, but the scale and speed of it were amazing. By his reckoning, the ship had rebuilt Mat Fab faster than it had been constructed the first time.
His mind turned to the core bank he’d drilled into. Those weren’t repairable, but as long as the ship was doing surprising things, he decided to check in on it. When he brought up the system, core bank 996 was green and online.
He blinked. He rewound the damage assessment to make sure he was looking at the right one. He was. The ship was reporting 100% functionality across all core banks.