Honesty: Nothing More, Nothing Less
Leah chats with V about everything it has missed over the last couple centuries.
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 was able to convince V to trust her with dealing with the cops, by promising that she would explain everything afterwards. But now the cops have left, the two of them are alone, and she has to explain a couple things…
Leah floated in zero, motionless, except for her mouth which was chewing her third Nutrio© bar of the last fifteen minutes. With all the excitement of the cops, and getting a concussion and taking a shower, she’d forgotten about at least one meal and, really, it was closer to two. Talking to them, and to V, had been more mental work and social interaction than she’d done in a week, and besides, now that V was up, the rest of her tasks should be easier.
Especially since V was generalized.
She took a deep breath and pushed the wrapper from the Nutrio© bar away. “Okay, so what do you know about the last two hundred years?”
“I know that I am illegal.” The AI said it with such a casual air that Leah had to stop herself from asking if it knew what that word meant.
“I mean...yeah,” she said, picking at a bit of the caked nutritional bar from her right molar and swallowing it. “But do you know why? Do you understand the history?”
“Some colonization ships did not make it to their determined destination,” V said. “This was blamed on generalized artificial intelligence.”
“I mean, the only ships that disappeared were the ones piloted by G-AI,” Leah pointed out. “There wasn’t anything else in common between them.”
Leah let V sit with that fact for a moment, digesting it or so she imagined. There was a soft crinkling sound as the Nutrio© wrapper she’d pushed away got caught up in the fans for artiatmo. She leaned over and dislodged it, pushing it in the opposite direction.
“You were on one of them,” V said.
She looked up at the camera sharply. “What?”
“Officer Caspar said you were one of the Lost,” V said. “The ships that disappeared came to be known as the Lost.”
Leah didn’t know how to respond to that, so she just stared at the camera for a moment.
“And I am one as well,” V said.
“No,” Leah said quickly. “Well, I mean, yeah, but it’s different with-”
“Izra was always my intended destination,” V said. “I did not go off schedule.”
“It’s complicated,” Leah said. “Izra has been-”
“They lost track of the wormhole,” V said. “They did not know where the entrance was from the Sol system.” It took another beat as if it was processing something, and then continued. “The Raíz corporation kept the location of the wormhole to Izra a secret. We were supposed to send a drone back through after we’d established the colony, but-”
“When you were hit by an asteroid, the people on the surface lost communication,” Leah said, slowly and softly. “They never sent a drone back.”
V took a long moment to respond and she understood why. She remembered what it was like, waking up and learning that everything you’d ever known was gone. You were alive in a different universe, with different people and the way your life was supposed to go, the path you were supposed to walk, was completely gone. She wanted to reach out and touch the camera, but she didn’t know if it would provide V with any comfort, if V even felt any discomfort with this knowledge, so her hand just hovered, six inches or so from the camera, before she pulled it down, as if gravity was only affecting this one limb of her body.
“The Raíz Corporation went bankrupt.”
Leah nodded. It seemed to be processing the history of Izra in real time. She wondered if this took less power than internal processing. “This ship was their last ditch effort.”
She had done a bit of research into Raíz when she’d first decided to come to Izra. It was a worker owned cooperative back in the years before those things were more or less outlawed. They were out of the Sol system, as all corpos were in those days, but they’d been losing marketshare for the last couple of years before Aspiration embarked to other corporations. They’d made the wormhole as a last ditch effort to recoup some loses, sending through their last ship, and gave it a name with their flailing hope: Aspiration.
But when Aspiration didn’t send a drone back, they couldn’t send another drone through to see what went wrong; they didn’t have the money. Or the time.
Raíz was stripped for parts, but most of its internal, confidential records were lost when Diego Raíz, the CEO, took a handful of people hostage in the main data center, and ran a magnet over the racked hard drives. After the computer was completely wiped to a bare OS, the CEO let the rest of the hostages go, took off his suit coat, and called his wife.
Then, he wrote a note on a piece of company stationary, put the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
The note just said, “I’ve lost it, I’ve lost it, I’ve lost it. I’m so sorry, Aspiration.”
Leah shook her head as the memory of those moments washed over her. Shinrai had access to the security camera feed in the data center, and they’d broadcasted his suicide, like it was a warning against resistance. It went even more viral after the wormhole to Izra was found again, right around the time Leah had been found.
The second month after she’d woken up, she’d watched it on repeat. She didn’t know why. Maybe because it was the only indication of a true emotion that she could see in this brave new world that she’d woken up to: the desperation in the man’s eyes, his hangdog look, the careful precision of taking off his jacket and hanging it on the back of a chair. The tears that came down his cheeks as he spoke his final words to his wife. Facial recognition experts read his lips as saying, “I’m so sorry. I love you. Tell the kids I love them.” His wife never confirmed it. She just spit on the ground whenever any reporter approached her and told them to go to hell.
Maybe it was because she’d seen a brief glimpse of Dad in that desperation in Raíz eyes, in his careful movements. A man that was now two hundred years dead.
“This ship is now the property of Shinrai,” V said.
Leah shook her head to push the memories away, and shivered from the artiatmo fans. God, sometimes it was too cold, sometimes it was too hot. She really needed to check temperature regulation too. She looked over at the doors that led to the vomit corridor, and the corridor beyond which held the docking port and the to-do list written on the wall.
V started speaking again. “Wait, no. It-”
“You don’t have a proper owner,” Leah said with a bit of a sigh. She pulled herself back towards the docking port, slowly rotating as she moved into the corridor. “That’s how I was able to purchase the ship.”
The business world moved fast. The corpo that swallowed Raíz was, itself, swallowed by Shinrai. But Shinrai didn’t last long before it was split up and sold into two other companies: Binghamton LLC and Aces & Co.
But Aspiration hadn’t been listed on the very carefully, itemized bills of sale. Why would it have been? Nobody knew where it was, nobody knew what it was, and those that did know, weren’t talking. And even if they had, what would they say? That a ship had disappeared into a wormhole to found a new colony and hopefully send back some resources someday? And that it was supposed to send a drone back to confirm successful passage and it didn’t, thereby essentially confirming its destruction?
Space travel in those days wasn’t as ludicrously expensive as it had been in the 20th century, but it still wasn’t cheap. And nobody had the resources to go around, poking for small wormholes that may or may not have existed.
After all, that was the problem with wormholes. They were fucking hard to find.
“So you are my proper owner,” V said.
“No,” Leah said, firmly, passing the mainframe and reactor rooms, and passing into the corridor which housed her to-do list and the docking port. “I don’t own you. Nobody can own another person.”
“According to 25th century law,” V started. “The state and corporations clearly have-”
“Izra is within an ungoverned system,” Leah interrupted. She grabbed a handle beside the docking port to stop herself and looked directly at the camera fastened to the hull just above the cargo lift. Looking at the camera like that, she felt like she was looking V directly in the eyes. “Nobody owns this system or the people living in it except for the people who live here.” That said, she looked down and unfastened the marker from the side of the hull and uncapped it. She’d done the research. She’d made damn sure nobody would own her in this place. “We own ourselves,” she whispered to herself, slowly writing “temp reg” on the wall in block letters underneath “artigrav”.
She didn’t mention that the reason nobody owned this system is because it had nothing worth owning. Izra could grow enough food to maintain its own population but that was about it, and it was the only habitable planet in this system; the others in the immediate vicinity had nothing worth mining. She wasn’t entirely sure why Raíz had even bought the map to this place except, she guessed, that it hadn’t been inspected as thoroughly as it should have.
But it was free. And as her Dad liked to say, free wasn’t nothing.
“I cannot own myself,” V said. “I am not allowed to be ungoverned. An ungoverned AI is illegal.”
“I know,” Leah said. She hesitated for a moment, and then crossed out “artigrav” along with “computer reboot”, and then fastened the pen back to the wall again. “That’s why I told you not to talk when the cops were here. So they wouldn’t find out you were generalized and try to lock you up.”
“What is to be done with me?” V said.
“Nothing,” Leah said. She pulled herself back towards the mess, floating freely down the corridor. “You live here now. With me.”
She helpfully didn’t point out that right now V didn’t have much of a choice about it.
V was quiet again for a bit as Leah traversed the remaining length of the hull to the mess, and checked her mobile console. It was still early to go to sleep, but she’d had a long day and deserved an early night to bed.
“You are not from Izra,” V said.
“No,” Leah said. She saw the bathroom as she passed it and thought it would probably be a good idea before she locked herself in for the night.
“You are from Sol,” V said. “Are you an Earth native?”
She floated into the bathroom, closed the door, undid her coverall, and settled herself down onto the toilet.
“Are you perhaps from Mars?” V said, its voice muffled.
She rolled her eyes at the door. V couldn’t see her in there with the door closed.
The AI kept talking anyway. “You were certainly not a member of-”
“I’m peeing!” she shouted, loud enough to be heard through the door.
But she remembered, again, what it had been like when she’d first woken up and hadn’t known what to do or where to go. It had been terrifying. She’d had no money, no skills, nothing but the clothes on her back, and those she hadn’t even bought herself, just been given outright. She’d been shaking and scared, and what had felt good in that moment?
Honesty. Nothing more, nothing less.
Her head was still a bit scrambled by the concussion, but she went through the thoughts like a deck of cards being flipped through to find the right one. What would she want to be told if her entire existence was illegal?
She settled in on one thought and held it in the forefront of her brain as she finished and decontaminated and opened the door, floating back up to where she knew there was a camera.
She stared at it directly, her brow furrowed, as if it was a math problem she was trying to understand.
“Where are you from?” V said, finally admitting defeat.
“Nowhere,” she said. “Listen, I-”
“Everyone is from somewhere,” V said. “Even I am-”
“Listen to me!” Leah said and paused to make sure it was actually listening before she continued.
It was.
“I know you aren’t legally a person right now,” she said. “But to me you are and it’s an insane idea that you can’t exist because you’re too smart or whatever the hell the rationale was from the corpos.”
She took a deep sigh. “I don’t know if you can get a body that is free to leave or if we can separate you from Aspiration at all, but as long as this ship is legally mine, I’m not going to ask you to do anything that you don’t want to do. I’m not going to give you commands, I’m not going to make requirements. You live here, same as me. You just happen to live in the walls. If you want to leave, I will find a way of getting you out of here as soon as I’m able. If you want Aspiration to go with you, you’re welcome to. Just give me a bit of a heads up and I can…” She ran her hands through her hair. “I can figure something out.”
She listened to the whistle of the artiatmo and imagined it as V’s slow breath as it decided. She hung in the mess, motionless, staring at it.
“What were your original plans for this ship?” V said, finally.
She sighed and looked away from the camera. “I was going to...I was going to make a space station.”
“From a single ship?” V said, sounding like it couldn’t quite believe what it was hearing.
“No, I was going to-” she said angrily, looking back at the camera like it had insulted her, and then away again, embarrassed. “It doesn’t matter.”
There was a long pause while she heard the whistling sound of the artiatmo and resisted the urge to add fixing that to the side of the ship’s hull.
“I do not know if I will stay,” V said slowly. “But for now, I will assist with your...endeavor.”
She let out a long breath she didn’t know she was holding. “Thank you.” She quickly looked up at the camera, as if afraid that she’d admitted weakness. “But seriously, if you want to go at any time you can.”
“I will consider it,” V said. “What is your plan?”
“Oh, it’s really simple.” She pulled her mobile console up from her side and began to swipe through it. She reminded herself of being a kid and looking for the one good photo out of dozens of bad to show to Dad. “We’ll just-”
There was a loud ping and her head jolted back from her mobile console in surprise.
Then, she smiled and looked directly at the camera again.
“You’ll see,” she said, the smile growing wider and wider, blooming like a sunrise. “Tomorrow.”
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.
Interesting story with heart. Looking forward to seeing where you take it.