The End of All Things: The First Instalment

by John Scalzi

  I have three, I said. Which again, was news to me, but I could come up with three questions, right?

  And in fact one popped up in my head. First, do you have a name?

  “Why would that matter?”

  Because I feel awkward just thinking of you as “that voice in my head,” I thought. If we are going to be working together it would be nice to have a name for you.

  “You may call me Control,” the voice said.

  Okay, good, I thought. Hello, Control.

  Control waited, silent. Well, fine.

  Second, would it be possible for me to speak to Secretary Ocampo at some point?

  “Why would you need to speak to him?”

  I don’t need to speak to him, I thought. I have already agreed to help you. But when I was taken off the Chandler he told me that he was doing this, whatever this is, to help humanity. I want to talk to him more about that, to understand what he meant.

  “It doesn’t matter if you understand,” Control said.

  I know this, I thought, and though I know you’re under no obligation to care, I disagree. You have my help. But if you had my understanding I might be even more useful. Secretary Ocampo is an admirable man. I respect him. If he’s doing this, he must have a reason. I think that reason could make sense to me. I would like to know more about it.

  “We will not let you speak to Secretary Ocampo now,” Control said. “But if in your work you do well, we may consider it for the future.”

  Fair enough, I thought.

  “Do not ask us about it again.”

  Of course not. You’ve already said you’d think about it. That’s enough.

  “Your final question.”

  Will you give me your word that I will get my body back?

  “My word,” Control said.

  Yes, your word, I thought. Your promise. I already said I would help you. I will. I will do everything you ask me to. You said that if I did I would get my body back. That was the deal. But there are deals, and there are promises. A deal you can make with anyone. A promise is something you make with someone you trust. If you make a promise with me, that means I can trust you. And that means I can stop worrying about whether I can believe you or not. And that means I can do what you ask me to, better.

  And once more there was a pause.

  I had a point in asking these questions, even if I didn’t know I was doing it when I started.

  Information. Trust. Creating intimacy and a relationship.

  I’d asked for a name, and while Control wasn’t much of a name, it was something. A personalization. Something that made that royal we into an “I.” Asking to speak to Ocampo further extended our deal, and turned it from something general—something they probably forced on every pilot whose brain they put into a box—into something specific to me.

  And asking for Control’s word? More intimacy—making the deal between me and it. Something with reciprocity. Something with trust.

  It was also a test.

  “You have my word,” Control said.

  Now I knew everything I needed to know about Control.

  And Control had no idea that I knew.

  That’s all I need, I said. I’m ready to get started when you are.

  “Then let’s begin,” Control said.

  The Chandler’s bridge appeared all around me.

  Or, more accurately, a computerized visual representation of the Chandler’s bridge; cleaner, plainer, and with all extraneous detail stripped from view.

  “You recognize this,” Control prompted.

  Of course, I thought.

  It was the standard bridge simulation program, used for training purposes, configured for the Chandler’s bridge setup, which in itself was pretty standard.

  I recognized it because like anyone else who ever did time on a bridge, I’d spent a couple hundred hours using it in addition to actual physical training at the specific bridge station.

  I also recognized it because I helped to program it.

  Or a slightly earlier version of it, anyway. It’d been a few years. This was probably an updated release of it.

  That said, a quick glance suggested that not much had changed in the software since I had worked on it. It didn’t even look like it was a new major release from what I had worked on. A point release, maybe? With some minor fixes? How does an organization clearly not hooked into the mainstream of Colonial Union commerce even get these programs? I felt vaguely annoyed on behalf of my former employer that this program had clearly been pirated.

  Not that I was about to mention to Control that I had worked on the program. Control didn’t know because Ocampo didn’t know, and I saw no reason to let either know. Control already thought I was stupid enough to believe its word on things. I wasn’t going to do anything to dissuade it of that notion.

  It’s the bridge simulator program, I thought, to Control.

  “It used to be a bridge simulator program,” Control said. “And for now, it will continue to be so. But we’ve adapted it to control the Chandler. Ultimately you will be able to control all the ship systems from inside of it.”

  How will I do that? I asked. The simulator program is designed as a virtual space but tracks actual hand and body movements. I’m missing both.

  “Here,” Control said, and I was in a virtual body. My view was clearly meant to be from head height; by thinking about it I could move it on a swivel, like I had an actual neck. I looked down and a stripped-down, visual representation of a human body was there. I imagined moving my hands and my hands came up from my sides, palms toward me, featureless where there should have been palm lines and fingerprints.

  I nearly had a breakdown right then, I was so grateful. Even a fake body like this was better than no body at all.

  Even so …

  Some part of my brain—I think maybe the same part that argued with me earlier—was going Really? That’s it?

  I knew what it meant. It meant that these assholes had taken my brain out of my body to run the Chandler, and I had to run the Chandler all on my own, and the way they intended me to run the Chandler was with a simulation of a human body I no longer had.

  Which seemed, I don’t know. Inefficient. If you’re going to take the time to get rid of my body, then maybe take the time to create a control metaphor that takes advantage of not being limited to a human body anymore.

  They didn’t take you out of your body for efficiency’s sake, said that part of my brain. Well, yeah, I figured that out a while back. It was about fear and control.

  But still. Kind of a waste of effort.

  I pulled myself back together (metaphorically), and looked around the simulated bridge.

  Are you coming onto the bridge with me? I asked Control.

  “No,” it said. “Please go to the captain’s chair.”

  I nodded. The captain’s chair had a screen where she could look at the information from all the stations, either at once or one at a time. Captain Thao, like most captains, tended to take reports from her bridge crew, who were better at boiling down the information into what she needed to know immediately. But she could get all the information from the screen if she wanted to boil it down herself. Which meant that I could, too.

  Likewise, the captain could control the ship from the screen if she wanted, rather than giving orders. Very few captains did, because things got complicated fast, and besides, if you want to make your bridge crew unhappy, the best way to do it was to try to do their job for them. The fact is that no captain was competent at every bridge station. Most didn’t try to be.

  Except now I would have to be.

  I sat in the virtual captain’s chair and pulled up the captain’s screen.

  I’m ready, I thought to Control.

  The virtual captain’s screen lit up, and all the department windows opened in a grid. Tapping twice on one of the windows would cause it to expand to full screen and become fully interactive. Only one department screen could be full screen at one time but yo
u could also chain full-size department screens together and swipe through them to access them quickly. It was all pretty basic except for the fact that I would be responsible for monitoring and dealing with all of them.

  I looked further at the captain’s start grid.

  Some of these are blank, I said.

  “Some of the ship functions you no longer need to control,” Control said. “You will be the only living thing on the ship and your living area is tightly sealed and controlled by us, so you will not need life-support controls. Likewise communications. We control those and several other ship-related functions. Others, such as engineering, you need to control only on a limited basis, and the maintenance of those functions will now be handled by us. The only ship’s functions you need to concern yourself with are navigation, weapons, and propulsion, including skipping.”

  That makes things simple, at least, I thought to Control. I made the windows for navigation, propulsion, and weapons full-sized and chained them together.

  I’m ready, I sent.

  “We’re sending you a simulated mission now,” Control said. “It is a simple one, focused primarily on navigation. Let’s begin.”

  * * *

  Ten hours of simulation that first day, at least by the simulation clock, almost all of it dead simple navigation that as a pilot I could do in my sleep. I had a suspicion that the simulations were not specifically chosen for me by Control, but might have been simply on a list of simulations to run that it was running through.

  It was boring.

  But it was also manageable. There was nothing that first day that I wasn’t able to do. The piloting, like most piloting, was about feeding information into the computer and then dealing with anything unusual that might go wrong. Nothing went wrong with any of these initial simulations.

  The most difficult thing I had to do was slide the simulated Chandler out of the way of a chunk of rock floating out of space. I considered using the simulated Chandler’s lasers to vaporize it—it was small enough—but I figured that wasn’t what the simulation was about yet, and anyway vaporizing it ran the risk of creating a bunch of even tinier bits of rock, harder to track, that some other ship would then ram into. Most ships could handle a micrometeor impact, but why create a problem for someone else when you didn’t have to.

  So I moved the Chandler out of the way, logged the rock’s present location and direction, and then would have simulated sending a data packet to nearby ships, except that I was not in charge of ship’s communications. So instead I made a notation to have the data sent to other ships at the earliest opportunity.

  If Control were noting any of this, I didn’t know about it. Control was entirely silent for that entire simulation, and the other runs we ran that day. “You will be controlling the ship alone,” Control said, when I asked it about the silence, between runs. “You will not have us nor any other person to communicate with once you begin your missions. You need to get used to the silence.”

  You’re not worried about boredom? I asked. Human minds need a little stimulation outside of monitoring navigation systems.

  “This has not been a problem before,” Control said. Which is how I learned for sure that I was not the first person they had done this to.

  I thought about other people in the same predicament and would have shuddered if I could.

  It also suggested to me that I might not even be the only person currently in my situation. That Control, whoever it was, might also be running simulations with other people and ships, even as it was working with me. It would be something I would need to find out, eventually.

  “We’re done for the day,” Control eventually said. “We will continue again tomorrow.”

  How many hours will that be? I asked. I didn’t know if Control was human, and wherever we were was almost certainly not a human outpost, so I had no idea of how long a day would be.

  “About twelve hours from now,” Control said, after a minute. I think it may have had to look up what “hours” were to make the conversion.

  What do I do now? I asked.

  “Whatever you like,” Control said.

  I’d like to go jogging, I thought.

  Control didn’t say anything to that. I was getting the idea that Control, whoever it was, did not have a particularly good sense of humor.

  What is there for me to do? I asked.

  “If you like, you may reload today’s simulations, and run them again,” Control said. “In fact, I suggest it.”

  Is there anything else? I asked. Anything to read? Anything to watch? Anything to listen to?

  “No,” Control said.

  May I request some form of entertainment? I asked. Anything would be good. If I only have navigation simulations, I think my effectiveness will eventually decrease.

  “If it decreases too far then you’ll be punished,” Control said. “If it decreases after that you will be killed.”

  Well, that’s motivation of a sort, I thought to Control.

  Control didn’t respond. I suspected Control had left the simulation.

  You need to get used to the silence, I thought to myself, repeating Control’s words from earlier in the day. Well, I was getting used to it whether I liked it or not.

  I looked down at the simulated captain’s chair and at the captain’s screen, on which a small menu tab appeared, with the day’s missions. I could reload them if I liked.

  Instead I got up and ran around the simulated bridge, doing laps. Then I did some push-ups and lunges and sit-ups.

  I want to be clear I was under no impression that what I was doing constituted actual exercise. I couldn’t feel my simulated body; even the double taps and swipes I made during the day were numbly done. I wasn’t doing it to keep my body in shape. I didn’t have a body to have a shape.

  I did it because it was something else to do besides what Control wanted me to do. Something I wanted to do on my own time. My way of exercising my own control. If you want to put it that way.

  It even kind of worked. Eventually I got tired. I lay down on the simulated floor to go to sleep.

  And discovered I didn’t have simulated eyelids.

  It didn’t matter. I was asleep fast enough anyway.

  This time I knew I had slept.

  * * *

  Two days later I broke the bridge simulation and escaped. Sort of.

  It happened after hours, once Control had gone off for the night, or what I assumed was night, anyway. I was running one of the day’s previous simulations, this one requiring me to navigate the Chandler into a docking position at a space station. It’s the sort of maneuver that I’d done dozens if not hundreds of times, both simulated and real. There was no challenge to it whatsoever.

  So I did what anyone doing a simulated run does when they’re bored and there’s no penalty for misbehavior:

  I started wrecking things.

  First I rammed the space station with the Chandler, because I was interested, purely for the science, how realistic the impact would be in terms of the simulation’s rendering of classical physics.

  Answer: not bad. I had limited control of outside sensors, so I saw both the Chandler and the space station crumple nicely, with appropriate bursts of metal and glass due to explosive decompression as the Chandler plowed through the station. My sensors did not indicate the Chandler’s engines overloading, however, which would have created a nice bit of mayhem.

  So I ran the simulation again, this time giving the Chandler enough distance to make for some impressive acceleration before I hit the space station.

  This time the Chandler exploded. All my control windows flashed red before blanking out, never a positive sign for the structural integrity of the ship. The simulation did not detail either economic or human losses, but I doubt anyone in the station sections I hit, or the Chandler crew, would have survived.

  The Chandler crew didn’t survive already, that other part of my brain said.

  I ignored it.

  The next
run-through I was curious what would happen if I attacked the station. The simulations I’d run didn’t require me to operate any of the weaponry systems, so while Control was around I hadn’t bothered with them.

  But I had control of them anyway, and they were fully operational, so. In the next simulation I launched three missiles at the station, just to see what would happen.

  A minute later my damage sensors went bright red as ten missiles from the station struck the Chandler at various critical spots, taking out weapons, engines, crew compartments, and outside sensors. About a second after that my screens went blank, because in this simulation the Chandler had just been turned into an expanding cloud of debris.

  Well, that was rude, I thought, and would have smiled if I could.

  Several more simulations after that, attacking the space station, then attacking other ships at the station, firing at shuttles, basically any combination of tactics that involved surprising someone with a missile. All the simulations ended pretty much the same way: the Chandler being turned into a missile pincushion.

  All right, fine, let’s try this, I thought, and ran the simulation again.

  This time I didn’t ram the station, or fire on it. I just slid the Chandler into docking position, and waited until the simulation gave me the “victory condition” signal—the signal that I had done what the simulation required of me.

  Then I launched a barrage of missiles at the space station, aiming specifically for its weapon systems, the ones I could see visually, but also the ones I couldn’t, going off the data I had of the space station. I timed the missiles so they would impact all the weapons systems at the same time.

  Which they did. And then, while everything was blowing up nicely, I opened up the throttles on the engines and headed straight into the mess.

  And as the Chandler made first contact with the skin of the space station, something happened.

  Everything went black.

  Not just the captain’s screens, which would have indicated that the Chandler had been destroyed. No, everything went black. There was the simulation, and then, for several full seconds, there it wasn’t.

  I spent those several seconds in the complete blackness wondering what the hell had just happened.