Dinosaurs and Hermit Crabs
A new visitor to the system invites some tension between Leah and V
Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.
Previously: Leah explained some history behind the current state of Izra and Aspiration, as well as giving V the choice to leave. V chose to stay, but wanted to know what the plans were. Leah promised that the next day, the plans would become obvious….
“What are you doing?” V said.
“You’ll see,” Leah said, not looking up at the comms hub and continuing to stare at the view-screen. The mess was silent except for the pulse of artiatmo. Leah vaguely wondered if she got the date wrong and looked down at her mobile console again.
“We should perhaps turn on artificial gravity if you want to-”
“No,” Leah said, not looking up from her console. She swiped up and reviewed some old messages just to make sure. She’d gotten the date right: 9:00AM IST March 15th.
“There are many aspects of Aspiration that need to be-”
“I’m not working on those today,” she said, looking up at the view screen. Was she even looking at the wormhole? She had no idea where it was. All she knew was that it was abnormally close to the only habitable planet in the Raíz System: Izra.
“The reactor, for example,” V went on, as if she’d never interrupted. “We will need to get the matter/anti-matter and cold fusion aspects working within acceptable-”
“I’m not doing that today,” she said again, pitching her voice just a bit higher so it sounded a little sing-song-y.
There’d been a quantum seeder who’d stopped by the Raíz System a few years earlier to check on the status of the trans-spatial trellis which kept the wormhole open, and took a couple days of vacation on Izra. After a couple drinks, he’d claimed he was able to see wormholes without any special equipment. He said he was able to look at the way stars were coming together in a particular patch of sky, the amount of space between the lights, and able to state with absolute certainty that is where the wormhole is.
Of course, Leah knew this was bullshit. After all, if a seeder could do that, then he would have been able to tell where the wormhole was two hundred years earlier and this system would’ve been chopped up and handed out to corpos just like the rest of the systems in the KU.
But staring out at the stars, she wondered for a moment if there wasn’t some truth behind his words.
“What are you waiting for?” V said after a long silence where nothing happened.
“You’ll see,” Leah said and took another bite off the Nutrio© bar and swig of water. “You don’t want me to ruin the surprise.”
The Nutrio© bar seemed to sit in her gut for a moment, heavy and undigested. She couldn’t tell if she was more nervous or excited, but every inch of her skin reacted to the cool air from the fans, prickling and standing up on end, her stomach roiling and making noises. She couldn’t wait until the mess was up and running. She could start getting regular shipments of actual food from Izra, food that included more than just protein and vitamins. She should probably look for a hab on her next ship, with hydroponic planters to grow her own vegetables.
She started to look down at her mobile console to make a note, but stopped.
It had appeared, appearing out of nothing, splayed out across the darkness of space.
The first ship was small and thin, comfortable for exactly one person, and even with only one person, not somewhere you’d want to spend more than a couple of hours unless you were whatever the exact opposite of claustrophobic was. She couldn’t see the tether, but based off the second ships movement, she knew it was there; probably nanofiber, a substance strong enough that it could hold together no matter what the void of space or strangeness of wormholes threw at it. The second ship was large and boxy, like a bunch of cargo containers piled together and fused. It was the type of thing that could only be built in space because it was too large and cumbersome to build in any sort of atmosphere.
When she had been kid, Leah had been obsessed with dinosaurs. She’d go into VR to see them, first with Mom as a guide and later by herself, and when she’d push back the leaves and vines and spy them among the trees, her stomach would clench as some deeply ingrained sense of survival hit her, her legs jolted with a drive to run from those creatures as fast as possible. But her rational brain would take over eventually, remind her that she was not standing among the ferns of the Jurassic Period, but the couch and carpet of her living room.
This feeling came rushing back to her as the two ships suddenly appeared out of nothing. The first one she knew, as most people did. Anyone who’d ever been to a space port were familiar with the little tugs pilots used to move larger ships around.
But the second looked like a dinosaur to her: ancient and terrible and beyond any real human understanding. At first, she thought it was bones, laid down in the blanket of the galaxy by space-faring archeologists, but when it moved and glinted in the light of Hebos and Geros, she realized it was sleeping.
And ready to wake up.
The first ship, the tugboat, immediately halted its momentum, and the cargo ship behind it followed suit. She knew the pilot was looking around the exterior of the wormhole, making sure that it was safe to proceed. That was the thing with entering and exiting a wormhole; because they were invisible to the naked eye, when you exited one, you were just suddenly there when nothing had been. Some of the newer trellis’ had warning systems so ships could queue up at the end, but the trellis Raíz had set up was one of the basic models, which made sense. Raíz had been working with pretty limited resources.
“What is that?” V said. If Leah had been paying attention, she would have noticed the note of worry in its voice.
But she didn’t.
“Hell yeah,” Leah whispered to herself. Her cheeks burned with the strain of holding the smile on her face. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled for this long. Even the day she’d set off from Launch and arrived at Aspiration, she hadn’t smiled this wide.
It was finally coming together. It was finally going to happen.
She sent out a ping to the leading ship, and got an acceptance.
“Ita-san,” she said, once the comms hub indicated she could be heard. “Welcome to the Raíz System.”
There was a bit of static over the comm channel and then she heard the other woman’s voice, deep and irritated: “This fucking wormhole is bullshit.”
She bit her fist to stop from laughing. “Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s probably a little older than-”
“Old?” she heard back. “If I saw a coin this old, I’d sell it to a museum and then I wouldn’t have to drag empty ships halfway across the KU.”
“I mean,” Leah started, feeling as if she had to defend this place she had now chosen to make her home, “It’s not like we’ve had any money to replace the trellis.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to,” Ita-san said and she watched the view screen as the towing ship turned towards Izra, the big cargo ship dragged along behind it. “I’m just saying. You’re not paying me enough for this shit.”
“I’m not paying you at all,” she pointed out.
“You know what I mean,” the pilot said and the ship killed comms.
She did a somersault in the air before pulling herself towards the doors to get out some of her energy.
“It’s happening,” she said under her breath, almost whispering.
“Leah,” V said, but she was moving too fast, so she couldn’t respond. V wasn’t using all of the comm hubs at once, just the one that she’d been nearest to when she’d first been moving, so as she moved further away, its voice faded. She grabbed a handle near the mainframe and heard the comm hub inside the room click on.
“Leah,” V said, again.
“Yes?” she said.
But V didn’t answer immediately and she couldn’t wait.
She kicked herself down, spinning slowly towards the cargo bay, ignoring the two comms hubs that flicked on as she passed, V trying to catch up with her.
At the bottom, she floated in a long, empty area, filled only with the handful of items that she’d carried from the shuttle a few weeks earlier. There were her day-to-day clothes packed into a square packing cube, a hover-chair folded up tight, a wheel-chair beside it, a pair of forearm crutches that she sometimes used when she couldn’t be bothered to use a chair. She half leaned in zero to pick those up, her body halfway to the bottom floor of the spacious cargo hold.
“Leah,” V said, its voice muffled. She looked behind her and saw one of the comms hubs turn on. She turned and tried to swim towards it, but she’d reduced her momentum so much that she couldn’t move through the ship and there was nothing that she could find purchase on immediately, nothing to push against that would send her flying towards the hub. She swiveled again and saw that the floor was just barely within reach of her crutch. She pushed against it, which started a slow ascent towards the hub.
She paused next to the comms hub and took several deep breathes, trying to remind herself to be patient.
“What is it, V?”
“Leah,” the AI said again. “Does your plan for building a space station involve connecting Aspiration to the cargo ship coming through the wormhole?”
She sighed. “Yes, V. After all, I’m a girl on a budget.” She pushed towards the access tunnel again. “When they ask to initiate docking procedures, you can give them a blanket yes.”
“Leah,” V said again before she’d gotten too far. Finally, she lost her patience.
“What?” she shouted, staring at the comms hub.
Another long pause, and then V spoke, almost soft in its words, “Connecting one AI to another will be strange.”
She took a deep breath and her heartbeat began to slow. Was that what it was worried about? That it was going to have to deal with another AI?
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and pushed off. “Sōzō wipes mainframes prior to putting ships up for auction.”
She was halfway up the access tunnel when she heard the ship begin to groan, just as it had yesterday.
Just as it had when V turned on artigrav.
Her heart leapt up into her throat. She pushed off the side and grabbed for the ladder. One hand scrambled, and then closed onto the rung, the other quickly wrapping both crutches around her wrist.
She glanced down.
The cargo hold was another twenty meters below her dangling feet. She could not survive a fall from that height.
She flexed her core and brought her feet forward onto the rung ahead of her. She started breathing heavily.
“V? What the hell are you doing?” she shouted. She looked around wildly for the nearest comms hub.
But it didn’t respond. In fact, the whir of the ship grew louder, the artigrav engine spinning faster and faster, gravity increasing beyond 1G and into 2G.
She gasped, her arms straining to hold her body to the ladder.
“V?” she whispered. “What is-”
“We are not hermit crabs,” V said. Its voice was terrifyingly calm. “You cannot remove us from our bodies and put us into another without ill effects.”
Great. Now she didn’t just have an AI roommate. She had a temperamental AI roommate.
“V,” she said, slowly, calming a little now that the AI had responded. The pressure on her shoulders forced her biceps to strain even further, trying to hold her on the ladder. “I understand you’re angry. Let’s talk about this.”
“You were not listening.”
“I understand,” Leah said. “I’m sorry. I was excited.”
“If you wish for us to have a cooperative working relationship,” V said. “You must listen when I speak to you.”
“If you want me to listen, you can’t threaten me,” Leah responded.
There was a moment where she wasn’t sure if it was still listening, a moment of stalemate. But then the creaking of the ship relented and pressure eased off Leah’s shoulders. She floated in zero again, but she didn’t fully trust it. She held onto the rungs of the ladder.
“I apologize,” V said. “It was not my intent to-” It stopped. “I am sorry.”
Leah took several shuddering breaths. “It’s okay,” she said eventually. She pushed off from the ladder so her body extended behind her, as if she was a flag on a pole. “We should set up some ground rules.”
“Ground rules?” V said.
“Some, uh,” Leah wracked her brain for some programming term she could use to explain. She grabbed the next rung up with one hand. “Best practices, conventions. To make sure we work well together.”
V paused again. “Do you have an example?”
“Maybe...maybe we could use a code word,” Leah said, starting to feel her heartbeat slow to a more reasonable rate. “When one of us is not listening to the other to make sure that the other one stops what they’re doing and listens.”
“Like a failsafe,” V said.
“Exactly,” Leah said, reaching up to grasp the next rung. “Just to make sure that we’re actually...being heard.”
V seemed to be processing. She took the opportunity to float the remaining way up the access tunnel, keeping her hand outstretched towards the ladder rungs to make sure she had some safety if the AI decided to turn on artigrav again.
At the top, she paused and moved to one side, feeling a lot more comfortable now that the solid ground was less than a meter underneath her instead of twenty.
“So what’s on your mind?” she said, forcing casualness into her voice, as if V had not just almost killed her with its temper tantrum. “And do you think it could wait until after we receive the shipment from Ita-san?”
“Hermit crab,” V said.
She looked up at the comms hub, where its voice was emanating from. “What?”
“That will be the phrase for our failsafe,” V said. It sounded certain, as if it was stating a mathematical principal. “Hermit crab. We can further discuss the issue after the representative of the Sōzō corporation has left the system. Do you wish me to retain the appearance of a non-generalized AI?”
“That would be good,” Leah said, feeling the tension in her shoulders begin to ease. “Are you okay with that?”
“Of course,” V said. “To do otherwise would put myself and you at risk.”
“Okay,” Leah said. V seemed to be acting logically again at least. She wondered if part of V’s volatility was being caused by how little energy she’d sent into the mainframe, like a child whose brain hadn’t fully matured. “Cool. Can you turn on artigrav and set it at 1G for now?”
“Yes,” V said, and she heard the ship begin to turn. She settled onto the ground and set her crutches in both hands, pressing them firmly.
“As soon as they come near, please initiate docking procedures,” Leah said.
“You have already provided blanket permission for docking procedures with this craft,” V reminded her.
“Yeah,” Leah said with a deep breath and tapped her crutches against the bare metal beneath her. She was in normal gravity again but at least, for now, she was expecting it.
She turned towards the docking port and the smile came to her face again.
This was it. The rest of her life had begun.
Commentary on this episode for paying subscribers will be released this Monday.
Credits:
ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.
Emily Westland as editor and producer.
Jamie Philips as design consultant.
Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.
Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.