by Ginger Booth
“We need a crowbar to make Teke leave,” Remi noted. With help from Nico and Sock, the physicist found the lair of his long-dead counterpart, the physicist who created the ansibles. Apparently the theoretical underpinnings of the ansible and the micro-warp gate didn’t quite align, despite the fact both clearly worked. The Denali scientist walked around mumbling to himself, distracted for days on end attempting to reconcile the theories – pig heaven.
Darren dismissed Teke with a shake of his head. “He’ll bring the databases and experimental rigs with him. He’ll take up a third of the hold. Prosper’s hold, not ours.”
The men continued chatting as the first round vote completed around them. Bron got on stage on behalf of the kids to emphatically endorse Mahina. They should leave ASAP!
Remi’s read was that the adults just weren’t ready to decide. They ruled out Sylvan and Denali easily enough. Those challenges were beyond their rusty abilities. Even running their own colony without Shiva’s control was a stretch. But they voted to send a fact-finding mission to Cantons before making a final determination. Mahina or Cantons, much preparation awaited before they could abandon Sanctuary. Mahina was simpler, but could take a year to ready the spaceships and pack. The Cantons expedition, with hired warp gate assistance from Thrive Spaceways, could add months or years.
They needed time to accept the change.
And there remained a small contingent who chose to stay here and enjoy the material advantages of their brilliant system AI. If they could buy Yang-Yang nanites, and persuade Thrive Spaceways to visit for trade every few years, they argued that even a very small colony was perfectly viable. They still had a wide genetic sample supply to draw on.
“For Loki’s sake, I hope they do stay here,” Darren murmured. “Because that damned AI isn’t going anywhere. Not if I have any say.”
“Amen,” Remi concurred. “Sass and Clay would be happy today.”
150
Sass had been aware for quite some time. She didn’t like to dwell on quite how much time. She shivered in pitch darkness, far too cold. The subliminal vibration of Thrive at rest carried through the walls of her coffin, which reeked of dried blood and urine.
No one catheterized a corpse. She knew where she was. My cryo bays.
Back at turnover, after they warped in, a healthy Clay waking in cryo was funny. Waking here from death clearly required new protocols. Including someone to check up on her.
She ached from every pore. But the worst pain was the screaming urgency from her belly. Her IV was fine for water, but her healing body demanded more fuel than a cryogenic sleeper. She desperately needed to get out of here. She felt weak as a kitten, and completely unequal to the task.
Someone clearly thought she had a chance when she inserted that IV. They must have given up.
Yes, she’d waited long enough. How did Clay get out of this thing?
Whimpering from the effort, she raised her arms over her head and felt around the cabinet opening. She had to stop repeatedly and breathe to gather her strength. Finally she found a release mechanism. Remi Roy, bless him, added a little spring assist. The shelf she lay on pushed out an inch.
She breathed deep of fresher air and rested a moment. Then she brought her arms back to her sides and pushed against the walls to slowly trundle her shelf outward.
A scent of fresh-baked bread wafted from the galley. Maddening! Except it inspired her to make that last Herculean heave to push herself free of the wall and sit up. She brought her legs around and yanked out the IV tubes. Next protocol item. Dead Sass gets a bottom shelf. Corky could fashion little plaques for them, his and hers. Sighing, she scooted off the thin mattress pad, trying to lever herself gently over the side.
Her knees and then arms both buckled, spilling her to the floor on her butt. Dammit. But after yet another breather, she pulled herself back to standing. Her pressure suit was heavy and cut to ribbons. She picked off the remains and toed them away.
“Help!” a muffled voice came from the cabinet beside her. It bore a throbbing red light – occupied and in trouble, as opposed to the serene blue of the available empties around them. “Let me out!”
Clay. Steeling herself, she managed to open his shelf too, and pull it from the wall. He looked like hell, starved as she was. Her legs worked a little better now. She spared him the fall to the deck.
“I put towels up here,” Clay shared, once standing.
“But not grav generators,” Sass surmised. “Or a comm tablet?”
“That would have been smart,” her first mate conceded.
“HELP! Anybody!” Sass yelled. Clay tried too. Their voices were feeble and creaky.
“Who’s up here?” A child’s voice, followed by a child. A boy, no older than ten, scampered up the wall from the catwalk and flipped into the bay. There he stopped, aghast. “You’re naked!” he objected. “And you smell.”
“I’m the captain,” Sass attempted. “He’s the first mate. Sass Collier and Clay Rocha. Who are you?” He looked familiar.
The boy frowned. “Socrates Acosta-Copeland.” He turned and hopped down from the bay. “Corky? Corky! There’s creepy naked people in the cryo bay!”
Sass and Clay gazed at each other. “How long have we been out?”
Clay suggested, “Bad conditions for us to recover. Cold, starving. Hacked to little bits time after time.”
Sass nodded slowly. “Must have lost a lot of nanites. And blood. So much blood.” Speaking of which, she shut her cabinet to hide the stench. But she hung onto its pull-bar for support.
Corky soon came at a run. Then she ran off again to find grav generators and blankets for them. As she explained along the way, no one else was home on Thrive at the moment. She stayed behind to mind the fort, and watch Socrates during the big vote. Today the Sanks decided whether to return to Mahina with them.
“How long have we been out?” Sass demanded. Corky assisted her first, down to the catwalk and on to her bedroom. “When did Prosper get here? And why did they bring Sock along?”
Corky clucked at her. “I’ll explain everything once you’re safe and warm! First things first!” She helped Sass to a seat on her bed, then scurried off to retrieve Clay.
Sock peered in the door at her. “You’re really Sass?”
“I really am. You look so much like Teke!” She didn’t see as much of Cope in him, not on the outside.
He nodded unhappily. “We’ve been here a month. My dads came to save you. Nico and I stowed away. Do you remember living in the AI?”
“Living in the…” Sass blinked a few times. There was a glimmer, like the ghost of a memory. It flitted away before she could catch it. “I was inside the AI?”
“I don’t know,” Sock admitted. “If it was you. You said you were a copy. But you talked to us through a robot. We helped you conquer Shiva. But then you deleted yourself.”
“Shiva is gone? Is the colony safe?”
Sock nodded. “Loki is the AI now. Your friend.”
The boy shifted out of the way as Corky half-carried Clay in to settle beside Sass. “Now you just rest while I get you some food! Chicken soup? Gelatin?”
“Ice cream!” Clay demanded. “Then steaks and bread and vegetables, plus a gallon of water apiece!”
“Sock!” Corky barked on the way out. “Aren’t you coming to help?”
“I am helping. I’m telling them what happened.”
“Please, Corky, leave him with us.” Sass brought Clay up to date, then turned back to the boy to grill him for more details. Which left them with a peculiar view of the happenings of the month they were dead. Sass was happy to hear that the local adults finally made an effort to raise their own children, however little the kids appreciated it.
Clay was right. The first serving of ice cream worked wonders. Sock enjoyed a bowl, too.
Corky shooed the boy out when she returned with a vast tray of food for their main course. “I spoke to the captains. Ben and Abel need to stay where they are to
cement our deal –”
“Abel?” Sass interrupted in surprise.
“Abel Greer, he’s our captain now,” Corky supplied. “Poor Remi was a little overwhelmed when you died all grisly like that. Anyway, Abel said he’ll send Remi and Dot to look after you. Just so you know, we plan to leave within the week –”
“Leave!” Sass cried.
“– With a new PO-3 like Thrive as payment. Maybe it’s an SO-3, since they built it here. That’ll serve as Cope’s new warp gate in the home system. For Denali service and such.”
“Home system,” Clay echoed numbly.
Sass frowned. “Payment?” Denali service?
Corky threw her hands up in frustration. “You missed so much, I don’t know where to start! Oh, yes I do. Once you eat, you sure could use a bath.” She held her nose in illustration. “Do you need my help to wash?” She clearly wasn’t eager.
Sass let her off the hook. “We can wait for the nurse.”
“And the shower,” Clay muttered.
“Good! I’ll let you eat in peace. Don’t hesitate to call if you need anything!”
Corky hustled out. Their appetites barely whetted by the ice cream, the couple fell on their suppers with gusto.
Once she’d cleared half her plate, Sass took a break from chewing. “Our big mission. To save Sanctuary. We missed it.”
Clay nodded thoughtfully. “Though apparently we did something heroic while we were dead.” Sock’s explanation on that point didn’t make much sense.
“Good thing we trained the kids well,” Sass agreed. “To carry on.”
They fell asleep before they finished their plates. Now with warmth and fuel, their newly minted nanites could work in earnest to restore them to perfect health. They slept for days.
151
Four days later, Clay ventured out of their cabin with Sass at breakfast to declare themselves fit for duty. Morning workout quickly disabused them of that notion. They spent half the day back in bed napping. But Captain Abel set up a bonus Mahina sunset drinks party in the evening nonetheless.
Ship’s time deemed it Wednesday. And Sanctuary’s sun blazed late morning outside. But no matter. Jules played a Mahina sunset video on the galley display, a cocktail party recorded at the ‘Thrive mansion’ backyard her family shared with the Acosta-Copelands in Schuyler. She turned the sound on low for extra party noises and a thread of music.
At Sass’s elbow, Clay worked the room trading hugs with friends eleven years parted, and with their newer crew as well. Then Sass, Jules, and Wilder fell to dissecting the elapsed love lives of their old friends Kassidy Yang and Aurora, the Denali envoy.
Clay escaped to get to know young Nico and Socrates by asking them how they helped overthrow Shiva. Both diffident kids, he was amused by the way Sock hid behind his big brother. Until Nico, who actually understood this stuff, got flustered and his baby brother proudly stepped forward as translator.
“Sass did the talking,” Nico explained. “Through a polebot. But I think you did most of the analysis on your side. You and Loki. And isolated a subsystem of –”
This droned on a while before Sock cut through. “I simplify the graph. The rules get all tangled.”
“Yeah,” Nico agreed gratefully. “It’s like spaghetti, makes no sense at all, until Sock cleans it up for me.” He hesitated, having lost the thread of how he reached this point.
Cope took the opportunity to step in. He and Ben had naturally drifted over to listen. “What do you remember, Clay? Between,” he spared a cautious glance at his sons, “uh, Beagle’s med-bay, and coming to in cryo. Hey, boys? Give me a turn with Clay.”
Clay waited for the boys to depart hearing radius, toward the food. “Well, I died. That was the usual. Or…no, that’s not true. When I die, there’s that life flashing before your eyes thing you hear about. But this time, it feels like it went on forever. Mind you, it’s all hazy. But it’s like I picked through all my beliefs, conclusions, a century of relationships, tracing through how this decision when I was twenty was affecting me at eighty. Interminable.”
“Sass?” Cope called her over to join them. She admitted to much the same.
“What are you on about, Cope?” Ben asked in concern.
“Bear with me,” Cope stalled him. “Was Sass with you? Inside the AI?”
“That’s ludicrous,” Sass insisted. “I was never inside an AI. Just a copy of my memories.” She seemed deeply disturbed by the suggestion. “Why the inquisition? We were dead.”
“Humor me.”
Clay narrowed his eyes, thinking. “Remember, this is all like a dream. But, yeah, now that you mention it. I remember Sass. Like we sifted through dysfunctional belief systems side by side, comparing notes? That doesn’t make sense.”
Sass glowered at him, perturbed.
“Of course it doesn’t make sense,” Ben reasoned. “Cope, those were copies in the machine. Our Clay and Sass were in cryo bay. They bled out most of their nanites. So it was slow going to build back up again. And in retrospect, putting them in cold storage didn’t help.”
“Better than rotting bodies,” Sass argued. “But yeah, I have some odd…memories? Sledding on real snow. Reading dog books to Hunter as a boy. Maybe Dot injected me with Clay memories by mistake? And I was sifting through? Like, no this wasn’t me, it was him. While I was on the slab in cryo, of course. Clay, like you said, that took too long. It couldn’t have been a ‘life flashes before your eyes’ thing.”
“That could be,” Clay allowed, unconvinced. “That we lay in cryo rejecting each other’s memory shards while we reconstructed our identities. Stands to reason we wouldn’t recall that too clearly. Although… It was after that, I experienced this complete letting go in a flash of white light, and merged into the universal.”
“Sass?” Cope prompted. “The same?”
She shook her head vehemently. “Nothing like that. Just the usual irritating sort of dream. Need to do this, go there, talk to Cope, Ben, Clay. Chores. Most of my dreams are like that. Oh, and some kind of argument with Shiva. But I’ve been arguing with that damned AI since we warped in.”
Clay quirked a lip. “My beloved isn’t fond of introspection. What are you trying to figure out, Cope?”
“It’s… Hang on. That final message Sass sent us. ‘Clay is a rich Fed,’ ‘Clay is rich,’ ‘Clay is a Fed.’ That seemed really important to you, Sass. I mean, I could see a final message like who should inherit Thrive. What does that mean, ‘Clay is a rich Fed’?”
Sass sniffed derision. “He knows what it means. Excuse me.” She walked away.
“Hunter would inherit my half,” Clay clarified for the record. “I believe Sass’s will splits her half between you two.”
“Thank you. Good to know,” Ben acknowledged.
Focused as usual, Cope couldn’t care less who inherited Thrive. Clay wasn’t dying. “Clay is rich Fed?”
Clay chuckled. “That’s…bad news. Um, I am wealthy. And I was a Fed on Earth. That’s a higher authority cop, like the marshals from MA. Superior jurisdiction over a cop like Sass. She probably still resents me for that. But combine them, and a ‘rich Fed’ would be a dirty cop. Abuse his power to make big money. Like Kendra Oliver. Yeah, she was the epitome of a ‘rich Fed.’ If Sass saw me that way, well, that would be a problem. Huh.” In fact, if that was her base belief about him, even after all these years, that would explain much.
Not that he was tempted to elaborate to Cope. So he changed the subject. “Your turn. Why the questions?” Ben looked to his husband as well. Clay suspected Ben was concerned about Cope’s little obsession.
“This is going to sound weird,” Cope hedged. “I feel like I had a relationship with Sass-the-AI. I mean, my relationship with the real Sass,” he waved toward her, now chatting with Dot and Corky, “that follows our real-world timeline. But I had this other Sass friend inside the machine. She was scared and alone and hated being trapped there. After you self-destructed –”
“I what
?”
“You were trying to overthrow Shiva. You had this scheme. You’d delete your identity directives and merge back into Shiva as a Trojan horse. Then Sass would pass you new directives to install. But your sacrifice didn’t work. You simply ceased to be. Then Sass tried again, with Loki for an ally.”
“And she told you all this?” Ben probed. “Calling herself Sass.”
Cope shook his head. “From the beginning, she insisted she was a copy of Sass, not Sass herself.”
Ben allowed, “Yeah, there was a…cockroach who told us the same. Floor robot. Two of them. I didn’t really buy it.”
“No, I talked to her,” Cope insisted. “She was Sass, a new Sass. And Shiva told us something odd, Clay. She was holding your ‘souls hostage.’”
Clay cocked an eyebrow. “What does ‘soul’ mean to an AI?”
“I don’t know,” Cope confessed tactfully. “But I’m not an AI. Even part-time. I’m just wondering… Nah, it’s crazy.”
Ben and Clay egged him on to express it. “It just seemed like you died. Then you were both inside Shiva. Then Clay, you died inside Shiva. I never talked to you there. But Sass lived on as an AI. And we shared a scary time. You know, the kind that advances your friendship. She would have said good-bye to me, I guess is what I’m saying. But instead, Loki passed me a cryptic message and said she was gone. And I checked your bodies in cryo. You were both dead as doornails when I got back here.”
Ben’s brow looked troubled. “She did say goodbye, Cope. And thanks for coming to save her crew. You know, when she was a cockroach at the end there by the elevator.” He worked his lip, clearly suppressing a grin.
Cope shot him a quick glare. “I think you existed in your bodies, then died. Then you lived inside the AI, then died there and returned to your bodies. Is what I’m saying. And Sass made sure you got fully deleted inside Loki, Clay. But Sass, I’m not so sure.”