Wrestling with Pigs
Leah asks V for a little trust as she tries to dissuade a couple newcomers from looking deeper into Aspiration than they should.
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 met V or Viaago, the AI that she accidentally woke up on the ship, and dealt with the concussion caused by artificial gravity being turned back on. But then V told her that a ship was on an intercept course, and, unfortunately, she recognized the ship ID…
Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.
— George Bernard Shaw
“Bacon?” V said. “Have genetic experiments-”
“Oh come on,” Leah said, dragging her eyes away from the view-screen and looking over her shoulder at the commbox. “Did you just ask if pigs can fly?”
“No,” V said. “I am simply unfamiliar with the-”
“People still referred to cops as pigs back in your time,” Leah said, looking down at her legs. The couple of steps from the shower to the mess hadn’t been too much, right? She could probably stand for a couple of minutes.
“Ah,” V said. “Slang. Of course.”
“I thought you were maybe trying to make a joke,” Leah said, not looking up from her legs. She flexed her quads, feeling them strain, and the cold metal of the bench underneath her biting through her jumpsuit. Artiatmo was supposed to make the ship warm, a comfortable 21°C, but it probably didn’t have enough power to maintain the temperature with the reactor offline. Not that a warmer temperature would have made this any easier. She was lucky to have some days where her legs worked at all.
“Humor is not part of my programming,” V said.
“No?” Leah said, looking up at the commbox with a smile, happy for the distraction. “You didn’t have to tell me that.” Her smile faded as she looked down at her legs again, took a deep breath and leaned forward to grip one of the rails embedded in the side of the ship to pull herself to her feet.
Her legs refused to hold her weight, and she fell back to the seat with a soft thump.
She gritted her teeth in anger, panting a bit, face flushed from exertion, but mostly embarrassment. She’d used up her energy moving those handful of steps from the shower to the mess, and now she had nothing to spare for the walk, a couple dozen meters away, to the airlock.
She took a deep breath, and tried to refocus. She didn’t know she was going to need that energy. And even if she did, she’d been confused from the concussion. It was going to be okay.
She let out her breath with her lips pursed, making a soft whistle. “V, can you seal the main corridor and turn off artigrav?”
“You said before you didn’t want me to turn off artigrav.”
There was something about its words that bugged her, but she pushed it away. She needed to focus on the active problem.
“I did,” Leah admitted. “But I can’t really move, so unless there’s another place for them to dock, you’re going to have to turn it off.”
V was quiet for a while and Leah let the silence sit, counting her breaths, trying to calm her heartbeat; it was way faster than it should have been with the energy she was trying to exert.
And then she realized: she was worried about the cops.
But why should she be worried? Cops here were different from where she grew up. They were more like counselors than anything else (that was one of the reasons she came to Izra; it was relatively untouched by corpos). But her stomach still flipped when V said they were coming.
While she’d been rolling this around in her brain, V must have been doing its own calculations because it said, “How do you know what the people of my time sound like?”
She ignored the question and tried to both push away the itch in her brain and pull herself to her feet. She failed on both counts.
She huffed. “Are you going to turn off artigrav or not?”
“Another system will need to be unpowered in order to provide power to the doors.”
“Well, you won’t need power for very long,” she said. “Why not just toggle artiatmo?”
V paused. “Are you giving me permission?”
“Can you not do it unless I say so?”
Pause. “Yes.”
She sighed again. “I hereby give my permission,” Leah said, sarcasm layering every word, “For the AI Viaago to toggle artificial atmosphere in order to close the door to what we shall henceforth refer to as the Vomit Corridor.”
She finished her speech, and looked up at the commbox expecting the faint whistling sound that was almost second nature to her now, to disappear. That whistling was made by artiatmo fans blowing around a mix of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen that scientists decided was best for longterm ship habitation.
But nothing happened.
She looked up towards where V’s nearest camera was. Maybe it hadn’t been able to understand her when she was sarcastic? Or she’d spoken too softly? “Uh...V?”
“Was that an attempt at humor?”
She facepalmed. “Yes,” she said, muffled, and then removed her hand, realizing V probably couldn’t have heard her. “Yes, it was.”
“Ah, I did not understand.”
The doors leading into the corridor slammed shut and artiatmo hiccuped off and then on again so quickly Leah barely noticed. Her brain was itching even more now.
“Did…” Leah tried to hold onto the AI’s phrasing, like a dream slipping away as a person gains a firmer and firmer grasp on consciousness. “Did you just say I?”
“Yes.”
Leah floated up towards the top of the mess, bumping her head against the ceiling. Luckily her hair was curly and thick enough, she didn’t really feel it. It was either that or the sudden realization that the AI on her ship wasn’t just old: it was generalized.
Generalized AI were super illegal, not just semi-illegal like selling porn to somebody coming from a poorly masked Mormon address or, say, building a space station in non-corpo space. No, generalized AI would get you locked up and for a good long time at that.
“Wow,” Leah said glancing between the commbox and camera, which, thanks to zero, was now at eye level. Fifty thoughts flitted through her head in the space of three seconds, before one crowded out the others, and she spoke it aloud: “I absolutely do not have time to deal with that right now.”
She grabbed a handle and pulled herself towards the doors that shut in the main corridor.
“What do you mean?” V said. “Deal with what?”
“Deal with you,” she said, waving at the camera with a vaguely dismissive gesture as she glanced through the window into the corridor. Just as she thought. The vomit was floating. “Is there a vacuum chute in that corridor?”
Most ships were lined with vacuum chutes that allowed for quick cleaning, sending anything that wasn’t fixed into a fuel chamber for the matter-antimatter reactor.
“Yes, but the reactor is not on,” V said. “Explain. What do you mean by deal with me?”
“Oh my God,” she said, glancing at the camera again so it could see how annoyed she looked. “We do not have time. I’m not going to turn you off or disassemble your mainframe or anything like that. I wouldn’t even know where to start. For now, you’re just going to have to trust me and do what I say or we’ll both regret it, okay?”
V paused for a long time.
Leah sighed and reminded herself, again, to be patient. “What is their expected ETA?”
“They will be connected to the docking port in three minutes.”
“I promise once I deal with the cops, I will explain, but for now, you have to listen to me.”
V paused again, but for a much shorter amount of time. “I do not have much of a choice.”
“You really don’t,” Leah admitted. “But I’m not telling you, I’m not giving you a command. I’m asking you. Trust me.”
V paused again. “Fine.”
“Good. Now open the vacuum chute, initiate docking, and shut up,” she said, running her fingers back through her hair. “I’ve got some pigs to wrestle.”
The doors to the airlocks slid open and showed two men, one tall and thin, the other short and stout, outlined in shadow from bright lights. Leah held up her hand, and turned her head to one side, her temples throbbing. She hoped these lights wouldn’t bring back the headache she’d just been able to get rid of. Do all patrol vehicles have lights bright enough to illuminate the entire docking tunnel and blinding whoever might be standing on the other side? If they do, does it actually make the officers safer or just make them feel safer?
“Evening, ma’am,” the shorter one of them said, pushing off the docking tunnel with his foot to float lazily towards her. He had a thick, drawling accent, as most people born and raised on Izra did.
“Evening,” she said. Her mobile console had told her it was around 5PM Izra Standard Time (IST), a mere three hours or so from when she’d flipped the switch to turn V on. Say what you will about local cops, but at least they responded fast.
The one floating towards her seemed to recognize that she was holding up her hand, and turned his head to look behind him at his partner. “Casper, Jesus Christ, would you turn off that light?”
“We don’t know what we’re walking into, Bill,” Caspar, the skinny one said, his voice high and nasal. “And I rightly don’t know if-”
“Well, I rightly do know,” Bill said, with the casual rhythm of a frequent argument. “So shut off that damn light so she can see us.”
There was a click, and the lights dimmed to a more reasonable shine.
“God damn, boy,” Bill said, the one who was headed towards her. He sounded like an older brother teasing a younger one. “You been working patrol five years. You ever have a real need to turn on them bright lights?”
“Thanks,” Leah said, lowering her hand a bit and turning so she could face them. “I had a little trouble when I turned on artigrav so bright lights are a little tough right now.”
The tall skinny cop near the patrol vehicle side of the corridor, Caspar, was white, wearing a thin beige jumpsuit that made his face look redder than it really was, and squinted at her like he couldn’t see all the way to the other end of the tunnel. The shorter one, Bill, had the same dark brown skin as Leah, which made her relax for a moment, before she saw the pistol holstered at his waist. Guns needed air to shoot, but they kept moving after hitting vacuum, faster than they would through the air even.
Still, though, he seemed relaxed, as if this was just a regular check-in.
“You got a concussion?” Bill said, breaking his approach by dragging his hand along the docking tunnel. Once he stopped, about two meters away, he peered into her eyes with his dark brown ones. “Latest drop said we’ve got a doc coming through in a couple hours if you-”
“No, no,” she said, maybe a bit too fast because Bill raised his eyebrows. She laughed nervously to try and throw him off. “I’ve had concussions before. Just need to rest a bit.”
He heaved a deep sigh, his mouth contorted in a skeptical frown. “Alright then.” He leaned in towards her, and she pushed off with her hand a bit to let him lean into the corridor. He looked down at the floor and she silently thanked V for turning on the vacuum chute, and artiatmo for cleaning out any smells. “So what happened? You said you got artigrav working?”
“Had it working,” she corrected. “I had to turn off comms to try it out. Before I turned them off, I made sure to set up a Dead Man’s Switch so that if I didn’t get them back on for some reason, somebody would-”
Bill raised his eyebrows again. “You turned off comms?”
She laughed again with a little shrug that she thought made her look helpless.
But Bill’s stare did not let up.
Maybe it only made her look helpless when she was in a chair.
“You know how it is,” she said, trying to smile with a confidence she didn’t really feel. “I only have the power from solar right now so I couldn’t-”
“Wait a minute,” the other one, Caspar, said. She felt ice flood through her veins as he pushed off from the tunnel and started headed towards her. Automatically, she put her hands up. Caspar seemed to notice and there was a bit of shock on his face so he grabbed at the docking tunnel to slow himself and stopped about four meters away. Because he’d only grabbed the right side of the docking tunnel, though, he began to spin in a slow circle to the right, a little crazed.
“God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you none,” he said, trying and failing to stop his rotation. He was clearly not as comfortable in zero as Bill. “I’d just heard about you, is all. You’re the girl from Sol who dropped in a few years ago, right? One of them Lost, like us?”
“Oh,” she said, lowering her hands. Her heartbeat started to return to a normal rhythm and she let out a relieved little chuckle. “Yeah, I am.”
“Good to meet you,” Bill said, extending his hand towards her.
She shook his hand. It was strange to feel the warmth of another body after a week or so without even seeing anyone else, let alone touching. His hand was rough and callused and reminded her of Dad. She pulled her hand back.
“You were saying?” Bill prompted.
Caspar finally succeeded in stopping his rotation, floating with his feet pointed at the floor.
“What?” she said, startled.
“You turned off comms,” Bill said, and gestured for her to go on.
“Yeah,” Leah said, and ran her fingers through her hair again. “I turned on the Dead Man’s Switch and then I routed power to artigrav, but it didn’t go quite like I thought.” She gave them a smile that she thought looked a little embarrassed. “It went from zero to three Gs in less than five seconds. I don’t know what they were doing up here last time to have the gravity set that high, but…”
She shrugged, letting the lie trail off into the air.
A long moment passed as the two men stared at her, as if waiting for something else. When nothing else happened, she shrugged a second time and sweat began to bead along her forehead and under her arms. Just feeling it made her more nervous.
“So, yeah,” she said, awkwardly. “That’s what happened.”
“How’d you get the artigrav off again?” Caspar said.
“Oh,” she laughed again, relieved that they were just waiting for the rest of the story. “Sorry. I’ve been a little out of it since I woke up. I crawled over to the power supply and cut it for the whole ship.”
“Makes sense,” Bill said, nodding. “Is that when you turned on the computer?”
“Computer?” she said, sounding confused but she felt her heart starting to beat faster, sweat beginning to drip down the back of her neck. “My computer isn’t working.”
“Working well enough for docking,” Caspar said, crossing his arms.
She was starting to really dislike him, even though he wasn’t quite as bad as she thought at the start. He seemed to have a habit of noticing things she’d prefer he not notice. Like most cops that way, she guessed.
“It is,” she said, carefully. “But not well enough for voice commands. Like I said before, solar doesn’t give all that much power, it’s only up enough for some basic comms like docking procedures.”
The two cops stared at her for a moment, as if they didn’t believe her but didn’t really have a reason not to.
“Alright then,” Bill said, finally. “This is just a checkup call from the Dead Man’s Switch, like we said. You’re alright now?”
She nodded confidently and then winced as her head throbbed. “Yup.”
“Good,” Bill said and turned his back, pushing off the docking tunnel back towards his patrol vehicle. “Have a good night.”
“Don’t turn off your comms,” Caspar said. She felt like he was reprimanding her, but could tell that he thought of it as neighborly advice. “You’re a sitting duck up here without ‘em.”
“Won’t happen again,” she said. “Just first week jitters.”
Caspar nodded and turned his back to her. “Have a good night.”
“You too,” she said. She waited until they opened the door to their airlock before she left the docking tunnel, went into her own corridor. She waited until she saw the door shut again, and pressed a button to disconnect from the patrol vehicle.
As soon as the door closed, the tension flooded out of her and she let out a big breath that she didn’t know she’d been holding. She knew if there had been any gravity working on the ship, she would have slumped to the ground.
“Okay,” she said, looking up at the nearest camera. “Now, we need to talk.”
Commentary on this episode for paying subscribers can be seen here.
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.
I enjoyed the audio version and the music was a nice touch.
Looking forward to the next installment.