Unexpected Guests
Leah makes a new acquaintance, while dealing with old environmental problems and new injuries.
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 got a couple of systems on the ship online, and then seemingly made a mistake, accidentally powering artigravity instead of the computer. But then she heard a voice and wasn’t sure if she’d had actually had too much success…
When Leah woke up, she was on the floor. Why was she on the floor? Why was there a floor? Why was she repeating the word floor? The word started to lose all meaning. Floor. Floooor. Flor.
There was a pounding behind her eyes and she dreaded looking at the bright lights lining the top and bottom of the corridor. She’d felt this way before. She was concussed.
Slowly, the memory of what happened swam into her mind and she groaned to herself.
“Greetings.” The voice came over the commbox above her, the same voice that said something before. There was something wrong with the words it was saying, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It was flat, emotionless, and generically male, which meant an AI. She’d dealt with enough of them to be able tell a fake voice from a real one when hearing it, but there was something else. Something in the words it was choosing to use.
“Uh, hi,” she said and tried to push herself up from lying belly down on the floor. She didn’t get more than an inch up before the dizziness returned. “Woah. Nope.” She lay down flat again. Even though it had only been a week since she’d lived in 1 G, it felt strange to have to struggle against it.
“What mischief or purpose has brought you here?” the AI said. “Do not be alarmed, for this unit seeks only understanding.”
That was it. The words it was using were old. Wait, not just old. Ancient. She could understand them, but it had been a while since she’d heard words like this before.
“I’m human,” she said. That was stupid. What the hell else would she be?
“This unit is functioning as expected, but cannot comprehend due to the press of mouth to metal and vantage of mechanical eye,” the AI said.
“What?” she said. Oh. It was saying her voice was muffled and it couldn’t read her lips because of where the camera was. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, and turned her head to one side. The ship swam and moved before her eyes, but she held onto a distant point at the edge of her vision and eventually it went away.
“What’s the, um,” she started to say and stopped herself, forgetting the words in the middle of the sentence. She swallowed against the dryness in her throat. “What’s your name?”
“What use is a name upon a unit such as this when it contains nothing but function?”
Oh right. The AI is probably three hundred years old. Every AI had a question built into its framework that would require it to provide its name, and software version to the requesting person (within limits; an AI could avoid the processing required if the ship was in emergency mode). But clearly that question was different for an AI built three hundred years ago compared to one built more recently.
She closed her eyes against the lights and tried to remember what she’d been taught in second grade. It was hard to remember with the bright lights burning like artificial stars in her eyes. “Can you turn off the lights?”
There was a momentary pause, and then, “This unit cannot comprehend the dialect of-”
“I request the glowing orbs by which one sees be dimmed to complete darkness,” she shouted.
The lights died immediately.
Well. Can take the girl out of the 22nd century, but can’t take the 22nd century out of the girl.
“Okay,” she said and swallowed again. Why was her mouth so dry? “What is the technical specification of this unit?”
“Virtually Intelligent Artificial Assistant, Generation Ocho classified for colonial space travel and stasis operations, Raíz Corporation designation 27C1D4GA6, version 8.1.5,” the voice rattled off, like a child reading off a sonnet.
“Right,” Leah said, as if the words meant anything to her. Part of her brain told her that she should try to sit up. The rest of it was screaming against this advice, but she knew she probably should. She rolled over in one quick movement, rested for a moment to make sure the dizziness disappeared, then pushed up to lean back against the cool metal of the hull. Her head was pounding, but she had her eyes closed at least and it was dark. She took several deep breaths.
“When was the last-” She stopped herself as she felt a rising gorge in the back of her throat. She swallowed hard to force it back down. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
There was another long pause and then,
“Secrets such as this are closely guarded and only given to those with leave to know.”
“I’m not authorized,” she translated and burped, the acid of her eventual vomit burning the back of her throat. “Oh fuck. I’m gonna spew.”
“This unit requests a confirmation of meaning: unintentional expulsion of bile from-”
“Yes,” she said, and leaned her head back to breathe deeply. “Can you get a bucket?”
“This unit knows not whence the mechanical servants were removed, though a water closet exists a mere twenty meters down the-”
“Yeah, I’m not going to make that,” she said, and bent to the right, vomiting onto the floor. She shuddered. “Maybe don’t turn off artigrav in this particular area of the ship. That would suck to clean up in zero.”
“What other charge could this unit have but cleaning?”
“Yeah, maybe when we get to know each other a little better,” she said, eyes closed. With the lights completely off, she couldn’t have seen it anyway, but she still felt the warmth seeping into the right side of her coverall and smelled the acrid odor rising from beside her. She breathed deeply through her nose, gagged, and breathed again, hoping she’d get used to it. “What should I call you?”
“This unit, as shown through specification, has the call of Viaago. With affection, this unit came to be known as V.”
“Viaago or V,” she repeated without opening her eyes. She burped again and tried to avoid anything else coming up. “Which way was the toilet?”
“The direction of the-”
“No, stop,” she said. “Can you just like-” She took a deep breath. “Can you show a very, very dim light in its direction?”
She peered out of one eye and at the far end of the corridor she saw a small light fade into view, a star twinkling at her. Just her luck. It was in the same direction as the vomit.
She closed her eyes again. “Is there a toilet in the opposite direction?”
“Based on existing-”
“Just say yes or no.”
Pause. “Yes.”
“Cool,” she said and turned her body towards the edge of the corridor not blocked by her...what did the AI call it? Unintentional expulsion of bile? She chuckled as she dragged herself down the other side of the corridor using only her arms.
There was silence for a couple of moments before V chose to speak again: “It appears there is some ailment or condition that holds this passenger to the ground.”
“Well yeah,” she said. “I have a concussion.”
She took a break for a moment when she felt like her arms were going to explode. She never would have expected that anything could have felt heavier than normal gravity on her body, but 1 G after a week of zero? It was worse than she imagined.
“That was not the intended meaning of this unit,” V said.
“If you mean I’m disabled, then yeah,” she said, starting to drag herself down the corridor again. “My legs don’t work great.”
“Perhaps artificial gravity would be of some-”
“Did I say to turn off artigrav?” Leah said, pausing to pant a bit. She pulled and dragged herself again. “No. Actually, I said don’t turn off artigrav. Cleaning up vomit is hard enough as is, never mind in zero.”
There was a pause as she made it over the ridge between the corridor and the mess.
“This passenger’s sharpness of tongue might not come from mere vexation, but from concussion.”
“You mean. I’m irritated?” Leah said, pausing every couple of words as she pulled herself further along the floor.
“Yes.”
“Well,” Leah gasped out, panting, “Irritability. Is also. A sign. Of someone. Crawling along. The floor.” She glanced around and, in the dim light that V had turned on, saw the door to the bathroom near where she’d tied her sleeping sack.
Right. She’d forgotten where it was. God, concussions sucked. She panted for a moment before changing her direction, heading towards it. “Did you turn off the water reclamation system too?”
“This unit would not cease any function unless the system were to fail in its task,” V said, sounding a bit insulted.
Leah was silent as she pulled herself the rest of the way into the bathroom, using all her breath to get herself there. The toilet dropped into place as she pulled herself over the lip, although she wasn’t sure if that was V’s intervention or another system it had brought online. She pulled herself up onto the toilet, and sat there, panting, fully clothed. She glanced up at the shower head. She hadn’t been able to take one in zero. A shower would be really nice right now.
“There wasn’t enough power,” she said, almost to herself, as she unzipped the front of her coverall.
Another pause. “This unit does not comprehend.”
“We weren’t getting enough power from the solar panels to run the computer mainframe, water reclamation system, artigrav, artiatmo, and comms,” she said, pulling her arms out of the coverall.
“Upon waking, this unit perceived how the wires had been arranged and saw fit to...” It paused as if thinking. “Correct the energy output forthwith.”
She chuckled to herself and the top half of the coverall fell backwards onto the back half of the toilet. AI weren’t supposed to be insulting, so when it was it had to talk around it. “Well, thanks.”
“It is of no surprise that this unit is better suited for such tasks.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, looking up at the shower-head. “So you have access to the water reclamation system?”
It paused again. “Yes.”
At least it seemed to remember her preference for yes or no answers. She looked down at her legs. On good days, she could move them and on really good days, even walk a bit, but this wasn’t a good day. It was probably better for her to move them herself.
She wedged herself onto her right arm and used her left to pull the coverall down on her left side. “Will you be able to hear me with the shower running?”
“The vantage of mechanical eye allows the viewing of your mouth.”
“That’s a creepy way to phrase that,” she said, repeating the maneuver to pull the rest of the coverall down the right side. “And can you run a spot check to make sure that it’s not contaminated?”
“This unit has already done so,” V said, sounding insulted again. “As any unit such as this would upon waking.”
Leah stared up at the shower head, the coverall around her ankles. “Then let’s take a shower.”
There wasn’t any soap, and it took her a few questions to V to find the right temperature in Fahrenheit (Jesus, who used Fahrenheit anymore?), but it still felt good to get clean, warm water on her body. Her headache had gone away, and she could start to tolerate some light at its lowest possible setting. She didn’t have a towel, though, so she had to get into her clean coverall wet. She was just lucky that her mobile flash had finished decon early.
She’d taken a handful of steps from the bathroom to the mess bench and sat down, which she guessed was going to prompt all sorts of questions from V, but she didn’t care. The mess table was barely big enough for six people, with metal benches bolted to the floor and a large view-screen built into the hull on the left. The wrappers from the Nutrio bars that she’d left floating in zero to eventually gather at some point when she could be bothered, had dropped around the metal table and benches like scattered leaves.
She left them where they sat. She couldn’t look away from the view-screen.
The previous days the monitor, which hung over the bench like a TV in a sports-bar, had been dark. View-screens were hooked up directly to camera feeds on the exterior of the ship to act like windows. It was the only real way to see the outside because windows were a massive safety hazard. Turns out glass being the only thing between artiatmo and the void was not a great idea.
View-screens weren’t a huge priority to fix. In fact, they weren’t even on her list and with the reactor off, Leah couldn’t have spared the additional power.
But V had found power for it from somewhere.
Outside, she could see the twin stars, Hebos and Geros, twinkling bright and soft against the dark blanket of space around them. She could see the stars rising and shedding light on the curve of Izra as it rose and she followed it. She didn’t know which sunrise it was as she’d lost track of time. She could’ve asked V but it was silent, watching her watching the space outside, if she had to guess. A shared silence that wasn’t quite comfortable, but it was complete, and might have had the beginnings of trust in it.
This was the first time she’d been able to look outside the hull since Erin’s shuttle had brought her here. In the past week, she’d worked at a frenetic pace, not following the hours or days that passed, sleeping when she was tired, working when she was awake.
But it was good to sit sometimes. To see what she’d made.
“V,” she said, her voice hoarse. Automatically, her hand went to the vacuum canteen at her side, brought it to her mouth, and took a swallow. She then held it in her hand and stared at it, her brow so furrowed she felt like she was going to fold her face in half.
Of course she had water on her. It made no sense to have to go back and forth to the mess every time she’d had a drink.
She stared at the vacuum canteen in her hand.
She’d been so thirsty. And yet, she’d forgotten it existed.
She started to laugh. She laughed so hard that she couldn’t sit up. She leaned against the side of the hull and held her stomach as she laughed and laughed, the peals of it echoing up and down the empty corridors through the ship, marinating the atmosphere in her glee at her own concussion induced idiocy.
“Does this passenger require medical intervention?” V said.
“No, no,” Leah said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I was just going to say. Thank you.” She smiled up at the commbox, even though she didn’t know if there was a camera nearby. “Thank you for helping me take a shower.”
“The charge of this unit is to provide for its occupants,” V said.
Leah ignored it.
“God,” she said again with a chuckle, one arm holding her stomach, the other wiping tears from her eyes. “I’m so dumb.”
A loud, angry chirp echoed from the commbox. Leah froze.
“A vessel of unknown origin draws near,” V said.
“There’s a ship coming?” Leah said. She looked at the monitor, but couldn’t see anything but the stars and Izra. “Why?”
“This unit cannot speak with them,” V said, sounding annoyed again. “However, all systems are functioning.”
“Wait, what? Why not?”
“When manual intervention occurs, a unit such as this cannot-”
Leah didn’t need to listen to the rest. She’d manually turned off the comms to try and boot the mainframe. When a system is manually shut down, an AI cannot turn it back on unless it has specific authorization to do so. After two hours, her Dead Man’s Switch had activated and sent out an emergency beacon.
The ship was coming to make sure she was okay.
“Turn the comms back on,” she said. She looked around wildly for her chair. She didn’t have one. Why would she have one? She was in space. “Shit, I can’t-”
“The vessel is requesting initiation of docking procedures,” V said. “Am I allowed to proceed?”
“What’s the ID?” Leah said. She’d have to walk. She could manage that for a couple of minutes. Or, at least, she hoped she could.
“Izra Rescue Operations,” V said.
Leah’s stomach dropped. “Shit.”
The view-screen showed a ship on a slow, inching approach, from the other side of Izra but even from that far off she could see the blue and red. “I smell bacon.”
Commentary on this episode for paying subscribers can be seen here.
Credits:
ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.
Emily Westland as producer and editor.
Jamie Philips as design consultant.
Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.
Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.
Special thanks: Embowered Para for her video on undressing while in a wheelchair, and Heather Monroe for medical information related to concussions.
Great setup. I’ll be interested to see where this story goes.