by Tim Pratt
“Probably space madness,” Shall said.
Elena hugged herself. “What do you mean?”
“Sorry.” Improbably, the computer coughed. “That was supposed to be funny. It’s sort of an in-joke among the crew. Any time someone does something strange or ridiculous, we blame it on space madness. The more deadpan, the better.”
“You’re an artificial intelligence, and you tell jokes?”
“Joking is essential to my functions. The earliest halfway successful attempts at AI were pure machine intelligences, but the problem was, they didn’t have much interest in talking to humans – no more than humans have in talking to random chains of hydrocarbons, say. People used to worry about artificial minds trying to enslave humanity, when in reality, such minds pay less attention to humans than humans do to slime mold. Those AI had a tendency to cease communication entirely, absorbed in incomprehensible abstractions. The usual shorthand explanation is, they’re off somewhere in virtual space, writing poetry in binary – which I suppose would at least be fairly easy to rhyme.”
“You aren’t very funny,” Elena observed, after deciding the issue wasn’t her own cognitive deficit.
“That’s hardly my fault. Scientists figured out how to make successful AI when they began using scanned human minds as templates. Blame my sense of humor on my human model.”
“Wait. Are you talking about mind uploading? Virtual immortality?”
“No. That’s a hard problem. People are trying to crack it, still, but the results have been disappointing. Even in the most successful cases, minds that have lived their whole lives in bodies tend to go insane when they’re suddenly removed from the flesh, and we aren’t good enough at emulating the full complexity of reality to fool those minds into believing they’re inhabiting bodies in a world yet.”
“Oh, good. This is all disorienting enough without coping with the idea of an immortal digital dreamworld. If you aren’t a mind upload, what are you?”
“A twin? A bud? A cutting from a tree? To create beings like me, we make a rough copy of a human mind, with thought patterns, syntax, and an approximation of memories, and that forms a seed crystal for the resulting AI. There’s enough human in me to make talking to living beings interesting instead of unspeakably dull. I’m not a copy of the mind I was based on. It’s more like we’re twins, initially identical in certain respects, but swiftly diverging due to differences in our environments – which, for me, is this ship. Its sensor arrays are my eyes and ears, its speakers and radios are my voice, its thrusters are my racing feet. I’m told I’m quite similar to my human model, though, in terms of personality. If it helps, think of me as a person who can do math very quickly, and who doesn’t suffer from low blood sugar, hormonal surges, or bad breath.”
Elena took another deep breath. It was time to ask some of the obvious questions. “You said I was asleep for centuries. How many?”
“As far as we can tell, around five hundred years.”
So. Everyone she knew was dead. She’d known that would happen when she began her voyage, and had said her goodbyes, though it felt like only days ago.
Wait. Not everyone she knew. “Is the rest of my crew here?”
“Ah. We were hoping you could shed some light on their whereabouts, actually. The other cryopods on your ship were empty, and there was no one aboard elsewhere. As best we can determine from the Anjou’s data banks, your crew woke up a few days ago. Two days ago, you alone went back into cryosleep. Today, we found you floating in Trans-Neptunian space.”
Her crew. Robin, their leader, her blunt cheerful competence unassailable, no matter what setbacks she encountered. Sweet Sebastien, with his big plans and big ideas. Uzoma, sharp as cheesewire, cold as the void. Gravel-voiced, deliberate Ibn. Even that irascible old devil Hans. All gone. Dead?
Another memory surfaced, like a bubble rising from the disturbed depths of a swamp: Hans and Ibn firing guns wildly at something far larger than human scale, something that scuttled and clattered through a vast space full of metal struts. That couldn’t be real. It had to be a nightmare.
But in cryosleep, you didn’t dream. Which meant it was either a terrible imagining… or a memory.
She shook her head. “Wait. Trans-Neptunian space? You mean, near Pluto and the other icy dwarfs? In Earth’s solar system? We should be light years away from here!”
“That is true. We’re all very curious about how you ended up here.”
“Who are you people?”
“You’re aboard the White Raven, a fast freighter owned by Captain Kalea Machedo, with a crew of five. Well, six, if you count me. Or possibly five again, if you consider Drake and Janice as– you know what, never mind. You don’t need a litany of names right now. You’ll meet everyone soon.”
“This isn’t a rescue vessel?”
“We rescue people when we have the opportunity, of course. In space, people take care of each other, because you never know when you might be lost and adrift. Sometimes we carry freight. Our cargo capacity isn’t huge, but we’re fast and nimble, and there’s a market for speed.”
“A market. I haven’t awakened in a post-scarcity paradise, then.”
“Alas, no. Though basic needs are met more easily, and more widely, than they were in your time. There are a lot more people, though. Fortunately we have lots of room.”
“You said you sometimes carry freight. What else do you do?”
“The odd bit of scavenging. It’s amazing what you can find floating around unattended. We also have a security contract with Meditreme Station… a place that came well after your time. It’s a major settlement in Trans-Neptunian space, built into a planitesimal, an icy dwarf just a tiny bit smaller than Pluto. At least originally. Now it’s covered in so much accumulated construction, it’s a lot bigger. A city in space, basically, home to fifty thousand souls and a lot of passing trade. Our security contract means we transport people who cause too much trouble on Meditreme elsewhere in the solar system, and occasionally we chase after the odd thief or murderer or smuggler or pirate. We were on our way back from a run to Europa when we noticed your ship and thought it might be a piece of scrap worth picking up.”
“So… what happens to me now?”
“I’m not sure. Normally we’d drop you off at Meditreme Station and charge you for the transportation – you can’t be sentimental in this business – but the captain has an inquisitive mind, and you’re an enigma, so if you keep her interested, you might be able to exert a bit more control over your destiny. That’s a bit of free advice from me to you. Would you like to meet the crew? They’ve finished the formal arguing part of their meeting and have fallen into more informal bickering, and can be safely interrupted.”
Elena stood up again. She felt steadier this time – in body, if not in mind. After waking up, the crew was supposed to stay in their pods for a few hours until their vitals were completely stabilized. Part of that long process involved the administration of drugs that helped with cognitive and memory impairments. She understood why her rescuers had taken her out of the pod early – they probably had no choice if the Anjou was wrecked. That made sense, didn’t it? She couldn’t be sure of her own judgment, which was part of the problem, and quite frustrating. She was used to trusting her own mind. “I guess I should meet them. I can’t stay in here forever.”
Five hundred years. Would the people of this time view her the way she would view a visitor from the time of Shakespeare? Strange and colorful characters from a history that looked romantic at first glance but became barbaric the longer you thought about it?
Shall coughed again. “Should I alert the crew that you’re coming, or would you like to sneak up and spy on them a bit first? Maybe see what they’re saying about you when they don’t realize you’re listening?”
She laughed, startling herself with the sound. “Why would you make that offer? They’re your colleagues. Shouldn’t you be on their side?”
“Yes, but they outnumber you. They’re
good people, but even so, you seem like you could use a friend, Doctor Oh. Someone to be on your side while you get your bearings.”
“You can call me Elena. It would be nice to make my own way, yes, and my own introductions. Will you show me where to go?”
The door slid open, smooth and soundless. “Of course. Start with ‘out.’”
Elena walked into the corridor, and could tell from a glance at the pale smooth walls, the lightwells filled with growing green plants, and the embedded “skylights” that mimicked full-spectrum sunlight, that this ship was more sophisticated than her own, which made sense: five hundred years made a big difference in everything from materials science to the aesthetics of space flight. The floors and walls were firm but slightly springy, like the artificial surfaces that some playgrounds had on Earth, and they would be a lot more pleasant to bump into in low- or zero-gravity than the brutal metal planes of the Anjou. The AI called Shall murmured to her in a low voice, telling her where to turn left or right, and she didn’t give in to her curiosity about the doors, ladders, and corridors she passed. Her mind felt fragile enough just dealing with the things that were definitely in front of her, without speculating on what lurked around corners.
“They’re in the galley,” Shall said.
Elena nodded, hearing voices from an open doorway just ahead. She started for the opening, pausing outside when she got close enough to make out the words:
“…were suicide missions,” a woman’s voice was saying. “Traveling at, what, maybe a tenth of the speed of light, launched at distant star systems, just hoping to find habitable worlds when they arrived?” She sounded more amazed than scornful, at least.
A deeper, gravelly voice replied. “It’s not as if they launched themselves at random. They used the best data they had at the time to choose systems with a high likelihood of habitable worlds – rocky, Earthlike planets in the goldilocks zones around their stars, neither too hot nor too cold to rule out the presence of liquid water and the ability to support life.”
The woman said, “Sure, but even in the best-case scenario, they’d be a tiny crew living alone on a rock somewhere, trying to build a society out of frozen embryos and seeds and fabricators, knowing even if they found a paradise planet it would be centuries before anyone back home could make the same journey to join them. They’d be dead before the colony even got a real foothold. Most of them probably just ended up nowhere, orbiting planets that couldn’t even support life, with no way to come back. Hell, Venus is in the goldilocks zone of our solar system, and it’s a hellish acid pit.”
Another voice spoke, this one male but somehow mechanical, as if projected from a speaker: “I think it was a noble experiment. Lighting out into the darkness with no guarantee of success, driven by the urge to explore. Humans have been doing that for as long as they’ve been doing anything – turning a log into a boat and setting out on the ocean, just to see what they could find. A lot of the goldilocks ships are still en route. I heard about one last year that found a planet we’d already colonized via bridge. Imagine finally waking from cryosleep in orbit around a pristine new world, and when you land, it’s already got people on it, because technology leapfrogged you while you were sleeping. Everybody looking at you like some kind of living fossil, and you just have to adapt to the new reality. It’s like that old folktale about the caveman stuck in a glacier who got thawed out and became a lawyer.”
Elena chose that moment to walk in. “I’m a biologist, actually. The law has never interested me much.”
Chapter Three
“The sleeper awakes!” Ashok crowed, though he wasn’t in the room: his comms were just patched into the ship’s public address system, and the computer was projecting his voice through a speaker on what was currently the ceiling.
Callie rose and put on her most professional smile, the one she used when she had to meet with the chief financial officer of the Trans-Neptunian Authority about exceeding her security budget, or to greet a client willing to pay over the going rate to get something valuable across the solar system fast. “Doctor Oh? Welcome to the White Raven. I’m Kalea Machedo, the captain.” She gestured to Stephen. “This is my executive officer, Stephen Baros. He’s also a physician, which is probably why he’s glaring and rushing toward you like that; don’t worry, he’s a harmless giant. The voice on the speaker is our mechanic, Ashok. He’s down in the cargo hold.” Where he was trying to make sense of the strange machinery he’d found attached to the Anjou, but she decided not to mention that part yet.
Stephen growled. “Shall, you were supposed to tell me when Doctor Oh woke up.”
“I forgot,” the computer said cheerfully. As always, hearing his voice gave Callie uncomfortable prickles all through her belly. She’d tried several times to get the computer to alter his voice to something that didn’t trigger quite so many deep and complex associations, but he always resisted, saying he didn’t sound right to himself any other way. The computer could be just as stubborn as his mental model.
Stephen bustled around Doctor Oh, which was a bit like seeing a hippopotamus fuss around a sparrow. “How are you feeling? Headaches? Blurry vision?”
“No, just some minor cognitive impairments.” Doctor Oh was watchful and serious, and seemed very self-contained. Callie felt that sparkle again, a throb in her solar plexus, a tightness in her chest, the desire to say oh oh oh. She resolved to ignore the attraction. They’d been cooped up on the Raven too long, doing speed-runs to the Jovian Imperative and back, and Elena was the first person other than her crew and Europan dock workers she’d seen in weeks. What she felt was just the lust of deprivation. And perhaps a touch of space madness.
Stephen peered into Doctor Oh’s face. “What sort of impairments?”
“Loss of continuity of memory, mainly. It’s a known side-effect of the emergence from cryosleep.”
Stephen grunted. “Your mind can’t be too badly scrambled if you remember that much. Your pod was damaged, drawing insufficient power, so it didn’t complete the wake-up procedure properly. Our chemical printers are synthesizing the recovery drugs you’ll need. When you’re ready, we’ll go to the medical suite and administer them. That should help any sense of fragmentation.”
“Would you like to wait until you’ve recovered more to talk about… everything… Doctor Oh?” Callie said. Curiosity was burning a hole through her like a welding torch through a bulkhead, but Callie could be patient when she bothered to try.
“Call me Elena,” the sleeper said. “No, I… It’s good to hear human voices. It’s been a long time.”
“Well, excuse me,” the computer said, in a mock-miffed tone.
Elena, Elena, Elena, Callie thought. Oh, Oh, Oh. “Elena, then. I’m Callie. I assume the computer filled you in on the situation? We can answer any questions you have – or try to, anyway. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
“Mmm… I haven’t had a cup of coffee in five hundred years.” A fleeting look of bleakness crossed Elena’s face. “Do people still drink coffee? It hasn’t gone extinct, or anything?”
“It did, briefly, a few hundred years ago. There was a blight. But we’ve gotten pretty good at bringing extinct things back.” That was mostly thanks to Liar technology, but Callie wasn’t ready to broach that topic yet. “We’ve got some brewed now, actually. Do you take it black?”
“That would be wonderful.” Elena slipped into one of the chairs, a modular seat attached to the floor that could lock in place or fold down out of the way, as needed.
Callie liked Elena’s voice. Her accent was unlike any Callie had heard before –and she’d spoken to people from Earth, the Jovian Imperative, the valleys of Mars, and dozens of stations and colony worlds in this solar system and beyond the twenty-nine bridges. There was an odd formality to Elena’s tone, too, but that could all be explained by the linguistic drift of centuries. Callie found it charming, and was annoyed with herself for being charmed.
Stephen sighed. “I suppose coffee won’t kill her,
though I’d rather start her on water and rice. I’m going to see how her medications are coming along. Send her down to me once you’re done chatting?” He lumbered out of the room.
Callie sorted through the drinking bulbs in the cupboard until she found a proper mug. They were under steady thrust on their way to Meditreme Station, experiencing enough gravity for liquid to stay in a cup, so they might as well enjoy it. She decanted a generous quantity of coffee and slid the cup in front of Elena, who wrapped her hands around the mug and lowered her nose over the rim, inhaling.
“Oh, that’s good.” She took a sip, then caught Callie’s eye. “This is all so strange. When I set out on my journey, I expected… I didn’t expect this. To be marooned? Wrecked? I wish I knew what happened.”
“Most people would be a gibbering mess in your position,” Callie said. “Stephen, Doctor Baros I mean, said your memory should recover soon. Maybe you can fill in some of the gaps then.” And fill us in, too, while you’re at it.
Elena looked into her cup as though she was staring into the abyss. “I’m afraid to find out what I’ve forgotten. Something bad must have happened. Your computer, Shall? He said the Anjou’s engines were altered. My crew–” Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat. “My crewmates are gone. We should be light years away from this solar system. I just don’t understand.”
Callie decided now was as good a time as any to address the elephant in the room. Except it was more like a squid. “When you woke up, you mentioned something about making first contact?”
Elena made a small strangled sound, and her hand trembled, sloshing a few drops of coffee over the rim of the cup. “I can’t remember, but there are flashes of a place. Some kind of hangar. A space station? There were machines, working on my ship, I think? Changing it? If it wasn’t a human station, then I suppose… but…”
Callie waited a moment to see if Elena was going to continue, but the biologist just stared off into space. Callie said, “Whatever happened to your crew, none of you recorded anything about it in your ship’s databanks, or at least nothing we could recover – your systems are kind of a mess. But… it’s entirely possible you did encounter alien life. Even an alien space station.”