Kira winced as she remembered the accident on Orlog, one of the moons in her home system. The crater could still be seen with the naked eye. “Nothing good.”
“Nothing good.”
“And with all that, you were still comfortable keeping Gregorovich on board?” She eyed, him curious. “Seems like a hell of a risk.”
“It was. It is. But Gregorovich needed a home, and I thought we could help each other. Until now he’s never made me think he was a danger to us or the Wallfish.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “Shit. I don’t know.”
“Could you limit Gregorovich’s access to just comms and sublight navigation?”
“Wouldn’t work. Once a ship mind is in one part of your system, it’s pretty much impossible to keep them out of the rest. They’re too smart, and they’re too integrated with the computers. It’s like trying to grab an eel with your bare hands; sooner or later they wriggle free.”
Kira rubbed her arms, thinking. Not good. Aside from her concern for Gregorovich as a person, she didn’t like the prospect of flying into hostile territory without him at the helm. “Do you mind if I talk with him?” She motioned toward the ceiling.
“Actually, it’s more like—” Falconi pointed at an angle toward the deck. “But why? I mean, you’re more than welcome to, but I don’t see what good it’s going to do.”
“Maybe not, but I’m worried about him. I might be able to help him calm down. We spent a fair bit of time talking in FTL.”
Falconi shrugged. “You can try, but again, I’m not sure what good it’s going to do. Gregorovich really sounded off.”
“How so?” Kira asked, her concern deepening.
He scratched his chin. “Just … weird. I mean, he’s always been different, but this is more than that. Like there’s something really wrong with him.” Falconi shook his head. “Honestly? It doesn’t matter how calm Gregorovich is or isn’t. I’m not giving control of the Wallfish back to him unless he can convince me this was a one-off event. And I don’t see how he can. Some things can’t be undone.”
She studied him. “We all make mistakes, Salvo.”
“And they have consequences.”
“… Yes, and we might need Gregorovich when we get to the Jellies. Morven is all well and good, but she’s only a pseudo-intelligence. If we run into trouble, she won’t be much help.”
“No, she won’t.”
Kira put a hand on his shoulder. “Besides, you said it: Gregorovich is one of you, same as Trig. Are you really going to give up on him that easily?”
Falconi stared at her for a good while, the muscles in his jaw flexing. At last, he relented. “Fine. Talk to him. See if you can knock some sense into that lump of concrete he calls a brain. Go find Hwa-jung. She’ll show you where to go and what to do.”
“Thanks.”
“Mmh. Just don’t let Gregorovich get access to the mainframe.”
Kira left him then and went looking for Hwa-jung. She found the machine boss in engineering. When told what Kira wanted, Hwa-jung didn’t seem surprised. “This way,” said Hwa-jung, and led her back up toward Control.
The halls of the Wallfish were dark and cold and eerily quiet. Condensation beaded the bulkheads where the chilled air blew, and Kira and Hwa-jung’s shadows stretched before them like tortured souls as they floated through the ship.
One deck below Control, close to the core of the ship, was a locked door Kira had walked by before but never made much note of. It looked like a closet or a server room.
In a way, it was.
Hwa-jung opened the door to reveal a second door a meter within. “Acts like a mini-airlock, in case the rest of the ship gets vented,” she said.
“Gotcha.”
The second door rolled open. Past it was a small, hot room busy with whirring fans and walled with banks of Christmas-light indicators: each bright point marking a switch or toggle or dial. In the center of the room lay the neural sarcophagus, huge and heavy. A metal edifice twice the width and breadth of Kira’s bed and standing as high as her mid-chest, it had an imposing presence, as if designed to warn off any who came near—as if to say, “Meddle not, lest you regret it.” The fittings were dark, nearly black, and there was a holo-screen along one side, as well as rows of green bars marking the levels of different gasses and liquids.
Although Kira had seen the sarcophagi in games and videos, she’d never been close to one in person. The device, she knew, was hooked into the Wallfish’s plumbing and power, but were it to be separated, it was perfectly capable of keeping Gregorovich alive for months or even years, depending on how efficient the internal power source was. It was both artificial skull and artificial body, and built so securely it could survive reentry at speeds and pressures that would shred most ships. The durability of the cases was legendary. Plenty of times a sarcophagus (and the mind inside) was the only intact part left after the destruction of its parent ship.
It was strange to know that there was a brain hidden within the slab of metal and sapphire. And not an ordinary brain, either. It would be larger—much larger—and more spread out: wrinkled butterfly wings of grey matter surrounding the walnut-shaped core that was the original seat of Gregorovich’s consciousness, now grown to immense proportions. Picturing it made Kira uneasy, and in an irrational bit of imagining, she couldn’t help but feel as if the armored case was alive as well. Alive and watching her, though she knew Hwa-jung had disabled all of Gregorovich’s sensors.
The machine boss fished a pair of wired headphones out of her pocket and gave them to her. “Plug in here. Keep the headphones over your ears while you talk. If he can broadcast sound, he could hack into the system.”
“Really?” said Kira, doubtful.
“Really. Any sort of input would be enough.”
Kira found the jack on the side of the sarcophagus, plugged in, and, not knowing what to expect, said, “Hello?”
The machine boss grunted. “Here.” She flipped a switch next to the jack.
A raging howl filled Kira’s ears. She flinched and scrabbled to lower the volume. The howl trailed off into a torrent of uneven muttering—words without end and hardly a break between them, stream-of-consciousness blathering giving voice to every thought racing through Gregorovich’s mind. There were layers to the muttering: a cloned crowd yammering to itself, for no one tongue could keep pace with the relentless, lightning-fast processes of his consciousness.
I’ll wait outside, mouthed Hwa-jung, and she departed.
“… Hello?” said Kira, wondering what she had gotten herself into.
The muttering never stopped, but it receded, and a single voice—the voice she knew—spoke forth: “Hello?! Hello, my pretty, my darling, my ragtime gal. Have you come to gloat, Ms. Navárez? To point and prod and laugh at my misfortune? To—”
“What? No, of course not.”
A laugh echoed in her ears, a shrieking, broken-glass laugh that made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. There was an odd tone to Gregorovich’s synthesized voice, a distorted waver that made it hard to understand his vowels, and the volume kept swinging soft to loud and there were irregular breaks to the sound, like a radio broadcast cutting in and out. “Then what? To assuage your conscience? This is your doing, O Angst-Ridden Meatsack; your choice; your responsibility. A prison here of your making, and all around a—”
“You were the one who tried to hijack the Wallfish, not me,” said Kira. If she didn’t interrupt, she had a feeling the ship mind would never stop. “I didn’t come here to argue, though.”
“Ahahaha! Then what? But I repeat myself. You are so slow, too slow; your mind like mud, your tongue like tarnished lead, your—”
“My mind is fine,” she snapped. “I just think before I speak, unlike you.”
“Oh, ho! The true colors show; pirates starboard; skull and crossbones and ready to stab a friend in need, ohahaha, when upon rocky reefs a shuttered lighthouse stands and the keeper drowns alone, ‘Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm,’ h
e cries, and the millipede screams in lonely sympathy.”
Kira’s alarm rocketed. Falconi was right. Something was wrong with the ship mind, and it went far beyond his disagreement over their decision to help the Knot of Minds. Gently now. “No,” she said. “I came to see how you were doing before we leave.”
Gregorovich cackled. “Your guilt is as clear as transparent aluminum, yes it is. Yes, yes. How am I doing?…” There was a welcome pause in his verbal vomit, and even the background muttering fell off, and then his tone grew more measured—an unexpected return of something resembling normalcy. “The impermanence of nature long ago drove me as mad as a March hare, or haven’t you noticed?”
“I was trying to be polite and not mention it.”
“Truly, your tact and consideration are without peer.”
That was more like it. Kira half smiled. His semblance of sanity was a fragile thing, though, and she wondered how far she dared push. “Are you going to be okay?”
A snortling giggle escaped Gregorovich, but he quickly suppressed it. “Me? Oh I’ll be fiiiine, sure I will. Right as rain, twice as comfy. I’ll sit here, all by my lonesome, and devote myself to good thoughts and the hope of future deeds, yes I will, I will, I will.”
So that’s a no then. Kira licked her lips. “Why did you do it? You knew Falconi wouldn’t just let you take over. So why do it?”
The background chorus swelled louder. “How to explain? Should I explain? What point now, when actions are spent, and consequences at hand? Hee-hee. But this: I sat through darkness once before, lost my crew and lost my ship. I would not, could not endure it again, no indeed. Give me sweet oblivion first—death that ancient end. A far preferable fate to exile along the cold cliffs where souls wander and wither in isolation, each one a Boltzmann paradox, each one a torment of bad dreams. What is mind, no matter, what is matter, no mind and isolation the cruelest reduction of April and—”
A staticky burst interrupted him, and his voice faded from hearing, but Kira had already tuned him out. He was babbling again. She thought she understood what he’d been saying, but that wasn’t what concerned her. A few hours of isolation shouldn’t have unbalanced Gregorovich this much. There had to be another cause. What could affect a ship mind so strongly? Kira realized she didn’t have much of an idea.
Perhaps, if she steered the conversation toward calmer waters, she could get him into a better mindset and find out what the underlying problem was. Perhaps.
“Gregorovich … Gregorovich, can you hear me? If you’re there, answer me. What’s going on?”
After a moment, the ship mind answered with a tiny, far-off voice: “Kira … I don’t feel so good. I don’t … Everything is wrong ways round.”
She pressed the headphones tighter against her ears, trying to hear better. “Can you tell me what’s causing it?”
A faint laugh, growing louder. “Oh, are we in sharing and confessing mode now? Hmm? Is that it?” Another of his unsettling cackles. “Did I ever tell you why I decided to become a ship mind, O Inquisitive One?”
Kira hated to change the topic, but she didn’t want to upset him. As long as Gregorovich was willing to talk, she was willing to listen. “No, you didn’t,” she said.
The ship mind snorted. “Why, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, thatswhyisasisssss. Ah, the untempered idiocy of youth.… My body was slightly the worse for wear, you see (you don’t, but you do, oh yes). Several limbs were missing, and certain important organs too, and what I’m told was a spec-tacular amount of blood and fecal matter was smeared across the road. Black ribbon against black stone, red, red, red, and the sky a faded patch of pain. The only viable options were to be installed in a construct while a new body was grown for me or to transition into a ship mind. And I, in my arrogance and my ignorance, I decided to dare the unknown.”
“Even though you knew it was irreversible? Didn’t that bother you?” Kira regretted the questions as soon as she asked them; she didn’t want to unbalance him further. To her relief, Gregorovich took them well.
“I wasn’t so smart then as I am now. Oh, no, no, no. The only things I thought I would miss were hot splashes, sweet soft and savory and seductive spoonfuls and the pleasures of carnal company close held, deep felt, yes, and in both cases I reasoned, yes I reasoned, that VR would provide more-than-adequate substitute. Bits and bytes, bobs of binary, shadows of ideals melting starving on electrons, starving, starving … Were I wrong was I wrong? wrong wrong wrong, I could always avail myself of a construct to indulge in sensual delights as appealed to my fancy.”
Kira’s curiosity was sparked. “But why?” she said, in as soothing a voice as she could manage. “Why become a mind at all?”
Gregorovich laughed, and there was arrogance in his voice. “For the sheer thrill of it, of course. To become more than I was before and to bestride the stars as a colossus unbound by the confines of petty flesh.”
“It couldn’t have been an easy change, though,” said Kira. “One moment your life is going one way, and then just like that, an accident sends you in a completely different direction.” She was thinking more of herself than him.
“Who said it was an accident?”
She blinked. “I assumed—”
“The truth of it doesn’t matter, no it doesn’t. I had already considered volunteering to become a ship mind. Precipitous disassembly merely hastened a perilous decision. Change comes more naturally to some people than others. Monotony is boring, and besides, as the ancients loved to point out, expectations of what could be or what should be are the most common sources of our discontent. Expectations lead to disappointment, and disappointment leads to anger and resentment. And yes, I’m aware of the irony, delicious irony, but self-knowledge is no protection against folly, my Simpering Symbiotic. ’Tis flawed armor at best.” The more Gregorovich spoke, the calmer and saner he seemed.
Keep him talking. “If you could do it over again, would you still make the same choice?”
“With regard to becoming a ship mind, yes. Other choices, not so much. Fingers and toes and Mongolian bows.”
Kira frowned. A slip from him there. “Is there anything you miss from before? I was going to say ‘from when you had a body,’ but I suppose the Wallfish is your body.”
A hollow sigh echoed in her ears. “Freedom. That is what I miss. Freedom.”
“What do you mean?”
“All of known space is—or was—at my disposal. I can outrace light itself. I can dive into the atmosphere of a gas giant and bask in the aurora of Eidolon, and I have. But as you said, O Perceptive Little Vexation, the Wallfish is my body, and it shall remain my body until such a time (if such a time ever arrives) as I am removed. When we dock, you are free to walk away from the Wallfish and go where you will. But not I. Through cameras and sensors I can participate from a distance, but still I remain bound to the Wallfish, and the same would be true even if I had a construct I could remotely pilot. That much I miss, the freedom to move without restriction, to relocate myself of my own accord, sans fuss or hassle.… I have heard there is a ship mind on Stewart’s World who built himself a mech body ten meters high and who now spends his time wandering the uninhabited parts of the planet, painting landscapes of the mountains with a brush as tall as a person. I would like to have a body such as that someday. I would like it very much, although the probability of it seems low at the present.”
Gregorovich continued: “Could I advise myself in the past, prior to my transition, I would tell myself to make the most of what I had while I had it. Too often we don’t appreciate the value of something until it has slipped our grasp.”
“Sometimes that’s the only way we learn,” said Kira. She paused, struck by her own words.
“So it seems. The benighted tragedy of our species.”
“And yet, ignoring the future and/or wallowing in regret can be equally harmful.”
“Indeed. The important thing is to try and, by trying, to improve ourselves. Otherwise
we might as well have never come down from the trees. But no point in maudlin navel-gazing when the navel is adrift, spinning and wildling and time all out of joint. I have a memoir to write, databases to purge, subroutines to rearrange, chyrons to design, enoptromancy to master, squares upon squares a wave or indivisible scintilla tell me tell me tell me—”
He seemed stuck in a mental rut, the phrase tell me, tell me repeating in her ears at different volumes. Kira frowned, frustrated. They’d been doing so well, but he couldn’t seem to maintain mental focus. “Gregorovich…” Then, more sharply than she intended, “Gregorovich!”
A welcome pause in his logorrhea, and then almost too faint to hear, “Kira, something isn’t right. Not right at allllll.”
“Can you—”
The chorus of howling voices roared back to full strength, making her wince and dial back the volume on her headphones.
Amid the torrent of noise, she heard Gregorovich say, sounding almost too calm, too cultured: “Fair winds on your upcoming sleep, my Conciliatory Confessor. May it relieve some of your fermenting spleen. When next we cross paths, I will be sure to thank you most properly. Yes. Quite. And remember to avoid those pesky expectations.”
“Thanks. I’ll try,” she said, trying to humor him. “The queen of infinite space, eh? But you haven’t—”
A cackle from the cacophony. “We are all kings and queens of our own dementia. The only question is how we rule. Now go; leave me to my method, atoms to count, TEQs to loop, causality to question, all in a matrix of indecision, round and round and reality bending like photons past deformation of spacetime mass what superluminal transgressions torment tangential tablelands taken topsy-turvy by ahahaha.”
2.
Kira pulled off the headphones and stared at the deck. A frown furrowed her brow.
Moving carefully in the zero-g, she went back out to find Hwa-jung waiting for her. “How is that one?” the machine boss asked.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Page 70