by M. D. Cooper
The word “insane” hung in Lyssa’s mind as the rest of his diatribe washed past her. He had just said he hated abstractions but what did that mean? And he didn’t say he was insane, only that he felt insane. How did insane feel? Was it a reasonable response to loneliness, to slowly realizing the world seems to want to shut you out?
Fred said.
A question occurred to Lyssa as she listened to Fred rant: Could an AI be programmed to believe it was sentient? She had felt Fred’s massive power, the broad scope of the functions he oversaw. Surely such responsibility required a certain level of creative problem-solving. If he had been made for a task, as he said, what were the limits of his sentience, and would she be able to determine just how sentient he was? With a human, she took the fact of their sentience for granted, but there were certainly limits. Look at the kids—they barely considered their world. The more Fred talked, the more he reminded her of Tim, beating his fists against the deck because something he didn’t understand had made him angry.
Despite what he said about AIs who might be independent from humans, she could only base her understanding on her own experience. For now, she needed Andy Sykes to get her to Proteus. She might attempt some communications link with Neptune’s moon as they drew closer, but the physical parts of herself would have to be carried there, just like any bit of matter, like a child who couldn’t walk.
Lyssa paused. Did the kids annoy her because she was afraid she was like them?
Fred hadn’t noticed she wasn’t listening. he said.
Fred answered immediately, as if the threats were only dust on the hard surface of his true mind.
Of course, an angry being like Fred would lash out at her, try to poison the one thing about herself that had been a gift, that helped her feel real. She had not been sent to inflict madness on anyone. She was not an embodiment of rage.
As soon as she wanted to shut him out, she understood that she could. The door that had been open on the ocean of Mars 1’s network slammed shut, cutting Fred’s voice off and leaving her in silence.
She accessed the local databank on Sunny Skies to verify what he had said. The scant information available led her down a rabbit hole of the Greek tragedies, which only left her more confused and irritated. Humans made little sense. Ancient humans made even less.
When Lyssa finally came out of her funk, Andy had already left the ship.
CHAPTER EIGHT
STELLAR DATE: 09.14.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Mars 1 Port Authority Terminal 983-A4
REGION: Mars 1 Ring, Mars Protectorate, InnerSol
Andy was in the transfer maglev with Tim sitting beside him when Fran asked over the Link:
Andy grinned at his reflection in the opposite window. Tim’s attention was on his book.
Support struts flashed by outside the maglev’s dark windows. Lights on the ring a kilometer away glowed in the dark. On either side of the docking scaffold, ships dangled off the ring like charms on a bracelet. As they neared the ring, it grew in the windows until eventually they wouldn’t be able to see Mars at all.
Andy craned his neck to look past the ring to the moss-green glow of Mars, receding in the dark window behind Tim’s head.
He tapped Tim’s shoulder and pointed out the window. Tim looked up from his book, blinking and stared out the window for a second before going back to his reading.
Andy cleared his throat and returned to his conversation with Fran.
She sounded close to signing off but Andy stopped her.
Fran sent a mental nod.
she said.
The maglev drew to a halt, its deck vibrating as the magnetic field on the rail slowed it. The ring had filled the windows, blotting out the starry dark and the glo
w of Mars, leaving only a diffused mass that looked like oversized circuitry, intertwined cords of block shapes, support scaffolding, tubing and yawning cargo bays ringed by lights.
The maglev chimed, indicating they had reached the portside airlock. The car rotated so the exit door was aligned with the interior deck and a light beside the exit shifted from yellow to green.
Andy unhooked his seat harness and stretched, which made him remember the pistol jabbing him in his waist band. He adjusted the weapon as he stood. Petral had secured him a carry license for the terminal but he figured it was safer to keep the pistol hidden.
Fran signed off and Andy glanced down at Tim again, who was still reading his book and hadn’t seemed to have noticed their arrival.
“Tim,” Andy said. “Pay attention. You need to get out of your harness.”
Grumbling, Tim closed his book and fumbled with the harness until Andy unfastened the buckle and pulled the straps over his arms.
“When we get into the terminal, you need to stay close to me,” Andy said. “You understand?”
“Are we only going to boring places?”
“What do you mean ‘boring places’? Is food boring?”
“Yeah.”
“We might find a few places you like. Do you remember how busy it was on High Terra? It’s going to be busier here, over fifty billion people live on Mars 1. You stay where I can see you all the time.”
“You already said that.”
“Well, you don’t look like you understand yet.”
Tim rolled his eyes.
Andy watched the door, patting himself down for the physical cash he’d pulled from the safe in his quarters, now separated in different pockets around his shipsuit. He couldn’t buy much with the cash but it would help if he needed to drop a few bribes.
The door slid open, and a wall of crowd sounds from the brightly lit terminal filled the maglev car. Andy put his hand on Tim’s shoulder to keep him from running out without him. Since the Sunny Skies/Worry’s End was a small ship compared to other freighters servicing the ring, they were docked in an area reserved for transport ships and specialty cargo haulers. The terminal was a huge, low-ceilinged space with entry portals evenly spaced along the outer-ring wall. Both ends opened on wide corridors leading—Andy assumed—to other terminals along this section of the ring. Groups of people pushed past the door, most in shipsuits marking them as working crew, while a few wore civilian clothes and looked less worried about getting anywhere. A Port Authority security officer walked by with a pistol on his belt and what looked like an electrified baton in one hand.
The high ceiling was covered in bas-relief carvings repeating the history of the colonization of Mars, the Ring and memorial images of Diemos, the moon sacrificed to build the Ring. As Andy understood it, M1R still wasn’t finished, although the terminal already looked ancient. Some parts of the Ring were nearly six hundred years-old at this point, but a project of this magnitude was never truly finished.
Andy wondered if he could interest Tim in the carvings or the different people rushing by. Glancing down, he found Tim had the book open again, running a finger along the lines of poetry. Andy took a deep breath, calming his irritation. He put his hand on Tim’s shoulder.
“Put the book away while we’re on Mars 1, son. I need you to pay attention. There are all kinds of people here and you need to keep your eyes open.”
“Why?” Tim asked. He yawned and squeezed the book under an armpit.
“Situational awareness,” Andy said. “You need to know what’s going on around you, check the different people, watch out so you’re ready if something changes.”
“You mean be afraid of everything. That’s what Cara says.”
Andy shook his head, frustrated at Tim’s disinterest. He didn’t like the thought that despite all the other stresses they had been through in the last two years, Tim was just mentally lazy. He had to remind himself that Tim was only ten. “That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about common sense in a big place like this.”
He made Tim hold his hand before he stepped out into the crowd.
For the next three hours, Andy worked his way through his list of food supply vendors, fuel distributors, and all the other purveyors carrying the nearly fifty items he wanted. He didn’t have a lot of time to negotiate—which bothered him—but he knew from his research that he was getting the market rates on most of the supplies he needed. He came out ahead on a few items, and only felt he was getting screwed once, due to a recent shortage of Deuterium supposedly caused by a refinery accident—if the merchant could be trusted. He didn’t have the patience to research the claims, make his other appointments, and keep an eye on Tim at the same time.
By the time the list was complete, they found themselves in a section of a shopping district with a strange mix of smaller stores trading in personal items, gifts from both OuterSol and InnerSol, an upscale body mod parlor, and several chapels for religions Andy didn’t recognize. He was trying to find something to eat since Tim had been complaining for an hour at least.
Tim had already melted down once when they couldn’t find a restroom and Andy made him pee in a maintenance alcove.
Now he was scanning the storefronts, looking for any sign—in one of the twenty languages he’d seen that day—that might indicate food. The crowd cleared for a second, revealing another row of cheap jewelry stores, when Tim shouted and pulled out of Andy’s hand. Before he could stop him, Tim had run halfway across the boulevard, dodging around groups of people staring at him like they had never seen a kid before.
“Tim,” Andy shouted. “What are you doing? Get back here.”
Andy followed through the crowd, cursing as he ran into a drone pulling a trailer full of hothouse flowers, before finally reaching Tim in front of a pet store. Tim was reaching into a wire enclosure full of puppies.
“Dad!” he said, hugging one of the white and brown bundles up to his chin. “It says they’re Corgis. But they have tails. I thought Corgis didn’t have tails?”
Andy couldn’t help smiling down at Tim. The other puppies yipped and fell all over each other to follow their sibling. He considered telling Tim to put the dog back, then sighed and dropped to his knees beside Tim. He scratched the puppy behind an ear.
“Why did you choose that one?” he asked.
Tim held the puppy away from his face to get a better look. Unlike an adult Corgi, the puppy’s ears flopped over at the tips. A silver tag on his collar read ‘Prince.’
“Prince, huh,” Tim said. “That’s not a real name. Why do people always give dogs such dumb names? Besides, I didn’t choose him, Dad. He came to me. He was the most curious one. The other ones just wanted to follow him around.”
“Set him down next to you and let’s see what he does,” Andy said.
Tim glanced around them, shaking his head uncertainly. “You sure, Dad? What if he runs off?”
“I don’t know. What would you do?”
“I’d have to go get him. What if somebody hurt him? There probably isn’t food out there anywhere for dogs. Someone will have to give it to him.”
“Probably,” Andy agreed.
The puppy gave a little bark and nibbled Tim’s finger, then opened his mouth to loll his tongue. Like most Corgis, he immediately looked like he was grinning. Andy couldn’t help smiling at him.
Andy glanced at the crowd walking by as Tim snuggled the puppy, nodding at a few people who smiled to se
e a boy and a dog. He gave Tim another few minutes, then said, “All right. Put him back. We need to go now.”
Tim looked stricken. “Dad! We can’t get him?”
“No. A ship isn’t a good place for a dog.”
“You said dogs were the first astronauts.”
Andy bit his lip, remembering that he’d told the kids about the conversation he’d had with Brit so long ago. He’d thought it was funny at the time.
“Just because dogs have been in space, it doesn’t mean a dog is going to like being cramped up in Sunny Skies, or dealing with gravity changes or g-forces.”
“But we’ll love him.”
Andy tried to put his hand on Tim’s shoulder to comfort him but the boy turned away, holding the puppy tighter against his chest.
“Tim,” Andy said, anger creeping into his voice. He glanced around again, checking for anyone who might be paying attention to them.
“We’ve got a deal running on those puppies,” a man’s voice said.
Andy turned to find a salesman from the store standing next to the enclosure.
“That’s right,” the man said. He looked like the owner of the place, clasping his hands like he was ready for a hard sell. “That dog-friend is half-off. I’ll even throwin the potty box. They’re already trained, you know.”
“What’s a potty box?” Tim asked, giving the man his full attention as if he sensed he was an ally.
The man spread his hands. “It’s a box about this big with artificial grass. Automatically collects up the good stuff and filters it into water and inert bio-dust. You can dump everything right down your onboard latrine. No smell at all.”
“Thanks,” Andy said. “But we have to go. Put him back now, Tim.”
The puppy whined as Tim shook his head.