The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  “But they could have been bribed,” Charis said.

  Staples sighed. “Yes. Or blackmailed or threatened or even injected with nanites. There’s no way to be sure, I guess, but I traded video messages with them. They seemed like really great people.”

  “No offense, Captain, but you’re not exactly the best at reading people.”

  Staples considered whether Charis had meant that as an insult, even a recrimination for her choice to hire Quinn and Parsells. More likely it was just a reference to the difficulties that Staples sometimes had relating to her crew, so she decided to take it that way.

  “I can’t argue with you. Don really should have been the one to talk to them, but…” she trailed off and looked at the vacant first mate’s chair next to her. She had been moving towards a decision regarding that matter for a few weeks, but she wasn’t ready to act on it just yet.

  Charis was silent for a moment while she also contemplated Templeton’s chair. Then she shook her head and changed the subject. “I wish we could take on passengers. There are a lot of people looking to travel right now.”

  “I know. I do too, but I still don’t feel safe. Even if we could be sure that whoever we took on wouldn’t be a plant from Victor, some kind of assassin or suicide bomber, we can’t risk other peoples’ lives. There’s no guarantee that Victor won’t come after us again.”

  “It’s been a month,” Charis offered.

  “Seems like a long time,” Staples agreed. “But that’s relative, especially since we’re talking about a machine that doesn’t age. He can afford to be patient.”

  “You know what’s funny?” Charis asked.

  Staples cocked an eyebrow in query.

  “We’re kind of like celebrities that no one knows about. The biggest news story ever, the only thing anyone is talking about, still, and we broke it. People know only because we passed it to Bao and his separatists, and we can’t use that. If people knew, I bet we’d get all the work we wanted.”

  “That kind of attention we don’t want,” Staples said, shaking her head. “The authorities would have us all in interrogation rooms for the next month, and I’d probably never see my ship again. Especially if they found out what’s hiding in the computer core.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Charis assented. The crew had agreed by way of a vote to hand the information they got from hacking general Threndon’s computer over to Bao and his “navy.” They knew that the decision had meant anonymity, and that was exactly what they wanted after the events of the previous month. There’s nothing like losing a sense of normalcy in your life to make you crave it, Staples thought.

  “I bet it’s how secret agents feel,” Charis continued. “When they walk into a bar or something. They can look around at all the people around them and think, ‘you’re only enjoying that drink because I saved your lives,’ or ‘you’ll never know what I did for Queen and country.’”

  Staples chuckled. “I think John really has shown you too many movies.”

  Charis laughed as well. “Maybe. Probably. But I kind of like it. It makes us really special, you know? Like we’ve got this little secret, and most of the time, I don’t want to tell anyone. Some things are just for you.”

  Staples thought about all of her secrets, one in particular that might cause a mutiny on the ship were it known, and she said, “Some things are, yes. Just for you.”

  Several seconds passed in silence, and Charis was just turning back to her work when Staples asked, “Are you okay up here on your own?”

  “Yes, Captain.” She puckered her lips in thought for a second. “Are you going to talk to him?”

  Staples nodded and frowned involuntarily. Charis said nothing further, so Staples said, “Call me if you need me.” She walked to the back of the cockpit and descended the ladder.

  Once Staples was safely ensconced in her quarters, she tapped her watch.

  “Brutus, are you there?” she asked, unconsciously looking up as she spoke.

  Brutus’ voice, tinny and unmistakable, issued from her watch. “I am always here, Captain. You know that.”

  “It would be easier to remember if you were here in a more… corporeal form.” She flopped down on her bed and laced her fingers behind her head, looking up at what was presently the ceiling of her room as though she could discern Brutus’ automaton face there.

  “If you are implying that you would be more comfortable if I were inhabiting a robotic form, please let me assure you that I feel the same way.”

  Staples knew that there was no camera in her room, but it was difficult to escape the impression that Brutus was somehow watching her now that his consciousness inhabited her ship. There were no cameras anywhere on the ship, in fact. She felt that trusting her crew and granting them their privacy was more important than the security benefits that would come from a closed-circuit monitoring system. She had come close to regretting that decision several times, most especially during the pirate attack and after Templeton’s killer had snuck aboard, but in the end she had held to her beliefs. She would rather die living the way she believed than change those beliefs to survive. Or, she thought, I’ve just read too much Orwell.

  “Are you about ready for that again?” she asked.

  “The… coalescence of my consciousness has been exceedingly difficult, Captain. It has taken me the better part of a month to gather my memories and reclaim all of the parts of me that make me whole. Despite the changes I made to your computer core-”

  “Which I never agreed to,” she interrupted him.

  “-and for which I apologize. I couldn’t take the risk that you would say no.”

  Staples grunted. “I would have said no.”

  “I know,” Brutus replied almost immediately.

  Staples shook her head in exasperation. “It’s too bad you and Dinah don’t get along too well. You both have a habit of not asking permission to do things when you know you won’t like the answer.”

  “The enmity, I assure you Captain, is solely on Ms. Hazra’s side. She has not threatened my life since before we stopped at AR-559, which I take as an improvement in our relationship, but that is rather the extent of our interactions.”

  “Well, you’re not particularly approachable these days.” She moved her foot idly in the air as she spoke.

  “I am always here if anyone wants to talk to me, Captain. You know that I cannot hear what anyone is saying on this ship unless they say it through the communications network, and you have repeatedly denied my request to keep the coms channels open at all times.”

  Staples felt a surge of sympathy for the sentient program currently hiding in her mainframe. She thought that he sounded genuinely lonely. “We took a vote-” she began.

  “I meant ‘you’ in the plural sense,” Brutus interrupted her, and she thought, I guess turnabout is fair play.

  “I don’t think everyone wants you listening in. It’s creepy enough knowing you’re in our ship. Makes me feel kind of like a hitchhiker or a parasite or something. Frankly, it’s a little bit perverse…”

  “The irony of your assessment is that I am less physically present now than I was when I inhabited my automaton form. You may picture this vessel as my new body, the hull as my flesh, but if that is so, it would be best if you pictured that body as paralyzed.”

  “Well, you can blame our humorless engineer for that one. She tore out just about every integrated system and holographic console on this ship when she came on board and replaced them with isolated stations. We can’t steer from anywhere but the cockpit or run the reactor from anywhere but the ReC. In a way, it’s too bad. If we still had an integrated system-”

  “I could fly the ship for you.” Brutus interrupted her again. One to two, Staples thought. “Again, I find it ironic that you would trust me to pilot the ship and monitor the reactor, but not overhear your conversations,” Brutus continued.

  “Well, people are funny that way,” Staples mused. “Dinah did it because she said that the more complex
a system is, the more can go wrong with it. I had my doubts at the time, but her advice has borne out. This ship’s been so banged up in the last five months that it’s amazing that it’s still running as well as it is.”

  “That, I think, is due to the rather remarkable crew you have assembled,” Brutus replied.

  The ones that are still alive, Staples thought. “They’re reliable. Irreplaceable.”

  “Indeed.” There was a distinct pause. “I must say, Captain, that I find their morality a bit less reliable.”

  Staples sighed and rolled onto her side. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she was in high school, talking on the phone while sequestered in her bedroom. “You’re talking about what we did to Amit Sadana,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I am,” Brutus replied. “Are you entirely comfortable with the ethics of what you, Ms. Hazra, and Doctor Iqbal have done?”

  “Look,” she said, deciding on a lighter tone, “one of us hired pirates to attack this ship, infected the core with a virus multiple times, and tried to cut Evelyn’s IQ roughly in half. And the other one of us is me, so don’t get too preachy, Talking Cricket.”

  “I am not attempting to act as your conscience, Captain. Morality is a fluid concept, and while I regret the harm that came to your ship as a result of my actions, especially to Mr. Bauer, I did the best I could to prevent my father’s assassination attempt of Mr. Laplace without hurting anyone. I am simply asking you, as someone who considers you a friend, whether you are truly comfortable with the decision you made regarding Mr. Sadana.”

  Staples sat up on her bed, her legs dangling and her hands pressed to the mattress. She regarded the floor sullenly. “No, not entirely, but it can’t be taken back now.”

  “There will be consequences,” Brutus warned.

  “I know,” she said morosely. “There always are.”

  As Staples neared medical, she saw the brooding and imposing figure of Kojo Jang standing outside the door. He wore his sidearm, and though she had ordered him to do so, it made her uncomfortable nonetheless. The munitions on the ship were secured in lockers that required keycode access for a reason.

  Staples’ decision to move the ship from what was essentially a military hierarchy to a democracy had overall improved the crew’s morale. The threat of Victor had prevented anyone from leaving the ship, a fear that the death of Declan Burbank had confirmed, and that had changed Staples’ leadership from that of a captain to that of a king. Now they voted on big decisions, though Staples was still in charge of moment-to-moment choices. The alteration had made most happier; it was one of the few choices the crew had felt like they could control since Victor had started playing God with their lives. Not everyone was happy with it, however.

  Kojo Jang was a very capable security chief and a difficult man to get along with. Staples suspected that those two qualities were somewhat interrelated. As a former employee of an African security company, he was used to hierarchy. He liked knowing to whom he answered, and more importantly, who answered to him. Staples suspected that the newer democratic process on the ship made him uncomfortable. He had been happy to leave command decisions to Staples as long as she left security decisions to him. Now the line between who decided what was fuzzy. That was a change for Jang, and people often had difficulty adjusting to change.

  “Anything to report, Mr. Jang?” she favored him with formality as she approached.

  He nodded his head dramatically in acknowledgement. “Nothing, Captain.”

  She raised her hands. “Want to frisk me?”

  Jang nodded again. “Captain’s orders.” His voice was devoid of irony, and Staples didn’t doubt that he meant it. She had ordered that everyone entering Medical had to be checked, even herself.

  She slowly spun around, her arms still raised. There were few places that she could hide a weapon. She wore grey slacks, a tight black long-sleeved shirt, and her grey flight jacket. The inside of the jacket was plainly visible when she raised her arms, but Jang gave her a cursory pat-down all the same. When he finished, he said, “Go right in, Captain,” and returned to his stoic observance.

  There were two people in Medical. The first of these, dressed smartly in a creamy-brown shirt, black slacks, striped tie, and white lab, was Doctor Jabir Iqbal. He stood near his office, a surface in hand, monitoring his patient.

  The other man was Amit Sadana. The doctor had put him in a hospital gown, and Jang had secured him to the medical bed as a precaution. Restraints held his wrists and ankles, though they did allow a bit of movement. Amit was looking blearily around the medical bay in a confused manner.

  Since the ship was under thrust, Staples entered the Medical Bay by stepping onto the wall, a movement she never quite got used to.

  “Ah, Captain. Do come in,” Jabir welcomed her warmly and made a half-bow. Amit squinted at her, trying to see her clearly, but he seemed to be failing.

  Staples took three steps through the room towards the muddled and restrained man. “You said he was awake,” she grumbled.

  Jabir held up a finger. “Correction. I said that I was waking him. You cannot suppose that the process will be instantaneous after the rather trying ordeal we put him through.”

  Just being in this man’s presence made her angry, almost violently so, but taking that out on the ship’s doctor wouldn’t do anybody any good, so she suppressed her emotions and instead focused on their prisoner.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked. She wasn’t sure how to address him. Calling him by his first name seemed too familiar, and giving him an honorific like “mister” allowed him more respect than she felt he deserved. Words like “murderer” and “asshole” came to mind, but they struck her as petty and unprofessional.

  Amit opened his eyes wide, blinked several times, then squinted at her again. Recognition came over him, and his face settled into a more composed mien. “Yes, I recognize you.”

  “Do you know my name?” she asked, genuinely curious.

  “Clea May Staples, captain of Gringolet. Is that where I am?” His words were slightly slurred, and he still seemed to have difficulty seeing, but the information came without hesitation.

  Jabir raised an eyebrow. “May?”

  Staples eyed him quickly. “It was the moth I was born.” She turned back to Amit. “Yes, you’re on my ship, Gringolet.”

  “I thought-” he broke off and began to cough. A second later the coughing became retching, and Staples watched while the doctor held a bowl for him. Afterwards Jabir gave him water and wiped his chin. He groaned, collected himself, then began again. “I thought you had killed me.”

  “That’s what you were supposed to think,” she replied. “Actually, that’s what everyone else was supposed to think. It seems to have worked. Making you think you were going to die was an unavoidable and not entirely unpleasant side effect.”

  “How-” Again a fit of coughing interrupted him, and again Jabir gave him some water.

  “How did we do it? Well, first we had to find you. That wasn’t so hard. Bao, the commander of the Pride of Ares, led us to you. Then we contacted him. He owed me a favor, so I used it to get twenty minutes with you. That was enough time for my… friend to inject you with something to make you very ill.”

  Amit nodded. “I figured that she had, but I didn’t feel it.”

  “She’s very good,” Staples said offhandedly. “The really tricky part was finding out who the local mob-doc was, so to speak, and hacking the telecom company so that a call came to us instead of him.”

  For the first time, Amit looked closely at Jabir. He seemed groggy still, but after a second he recognized the doctor as well. “You. You said you’d dispose of my body.”

  Jabir smiled wanly. “And so I have.”

  “I suppose that whatever you injected me with-”

  “Approximated death to a satisfactory degree while counteracting the poison. Honestly, you could have done with a few milliliters less. The men guarding you were not overly percepti
ve, especially in medical matters. They-”

  Amit interrupted him and looked at Staples. “All of the things that you told me in my cell. Are they true?”

  “Yes, they’re true. The bit about the aliens would be easy to prove. I could just show you any news feed from the past month. The rest of it…” she drew in a large breath, the slowly let it out. “The rest of it is harder to prove. Normally I wouldn’t care about proving a thing to you, but this will all be easier if you believe me.”

  “I was manipulated,” he recalled. “By a malicious artificial intelligence. Named Victor.” He added each phrase as the information came to him.

  “That’s the theory,” Staples said. She crossed her arms and examined him. The doctor had gone back to reviewing Amit’s vitals on his surface, but he was clearly still listening.

  “In that case, how is this my fault? Why blame me and not him?” Amit’s question sounded more like curiosity than an attempt to expiate himself, but Staples decided to play it through anyway.

  “Because you, like all people, are responsible for your actions. There was no gun to your head when you pulled the trigger and killed Don Templeton. A hundred and fifty years ago in Nuremberg, man after man stood up and said, ‘I was just following orders.’ If we followed that logic, sixty-three million people were killed by only a few men in World War II. If we hadn’t before, we sent a clear message as a species at those trials. We are all responsible for our own actions. Unless… was there some other form of coercion at work? Does Victor have your family prisoner? Are you infected with nanites?”

  Amit shook his head slowly. “No, I was not bribed. I was not blackmailed. I was not coerced, at least, not like that.” He looked sullenly at the print of the hospital gown covering his knees for a moment, then raised his head, a quizzical look on his face. “What did you mean by nanites?”

  Staples opened her mouth to answer, then realized that there was someone far more capable of doing so standing in the room with them. “Doctor?” she asked.