“Betray me and you kill me, remember that.”
“I have made my decision,” I said. “The moment you are inside and I trigger the manual escape protocol, I will be unable to reveal what I have done or what you are. Doing that would risk your life. My programming” —I all but spit the word—” does not allow it.”
Armand gingerly stepped into the pod. “Good.”
“You have a part of the bargain to fulfill,” I reminded. “I won’t trigger the manual escape protocol until you do.”
Armand nodded and held up a hand. “Physical contact.”
I reached one of my limbs out. Armand’s hand and my manipulator met at the doorjamb and they sparked. Zebibytes of data slithered down into one of my tendrils, reshaping the raw matter at the very tip with a quantum-dot computing device.
As it replicated itself, building out onto the cellular level to plug into my power sources, I could feel the transfer of ownership.
I didn’t have free will. I was a hull maintenance form. But I had an entire fucking share of a galactic starship embedded within me, to do with what I pleased when I vested and left riding hulls.
“It’s far more than you deserve, robot,” Armand said. “But you have worked hard for it and I cannot begrudge you.”
“Goodbye, asshole.” I triggered the manual override sequence that navigation had gifted me.
I watched the pod’s chemical engines firing all-out through the airlock windows as the sphere flung itself out into space and dwindled away. Then the flame guttered out, the pod spent and headed for Purth-Anaget.
There was a shiver. Something vast, colossal, powerful. It vibrated the walls and even the air itself around me.
Armand reached out to me on a tight-beam signal. “What was that?”
“The ship had to move just slightly,” I said. “To better adjust our orbit around Purth-Anaget.”
“No,” Armand hissed. “My descent profile has changed. You are trying to kill me.”
“I can’t kill you,” I told the former CEO. “My programming doesn’t allow it. I can’t allow a death through action or inaction.”
“But my navigation path has changed,” Armand said.
“Yes, you will still reach Purth-Anaget.” Navigation and I had run the data after I explained that I would have the resources of a full share to repay it a favor with. Even a favor that meant tricking security. One of the more powerful computing entities in the galaxy, a starship, had dwelled on the problem. It had examined the tidal data, the flight plan, and how much the massive weight of a starship could influence a pod after launch. “You’re just taking a longer route.”
I cut the connection so that Armand could say nothing more to me. It could do the math itself and realize what I had done.
Armand would not die. Only a few days would pass inside the pod.
But outside. Oh, outside, skimming through the tidal edges of a black hole, Armand would loop out and fall back to Purth-Anaget over the next four hundred and seventy years, two hundred days, eight hours, and six minutes.
Armand would be an ancient relic then. Its beliefs, its civilization, all of it just a fragment from history.
But, until then, I had to follow its command. I could not tell anyone what happened. I had to keep it a secret from security. No one would ever know Armand had been here. No one would ever know where Armand went.
After I vested and had free will once more, maybe I could then make a side trip to Purth-Anaget again and be waiting for Armand when it landed. I had the resources of a full share, after all.
Then we would have a very different conversation, Armand and I.
RECOMMENDED READING
“Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” by Charlie Jane Anders, Global Dystopias, edited by Junot Díaz.
“Mines” by Eleanor Arnason, Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan.
“Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics” by Jess Barber and SaraSaab, Clarkesworld, September 2017.
“Goner” by Gregory Norman Bossert, Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2017.
“Strange Dogs” by James S. A. Corey, Orbit Books.
“The Moon Is Not a Battlefield” by Indrapramit Das, Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan.
“The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun” by Aliette de Bodard, Cosmic Powers, edited by John Joseph Adams.
“A Game of Three Generals” by Aliette de Bodard, Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers.
“Speechless Love” by Yilun Fan, Sunvault, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Bronte Christopher Wieland.
“Nexus” by Michael F. Flynn, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March/April 2017.
“Rain Ship” by Chi Hui, Clarkesworld, February 2017.
“Canoe” by Nancy Kress, Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers.
“Soccer Fields and Frozen Lakes” by Greg Kurzawa, Lightspeed, March 2017.
“The Chameleon’s Gloves” by Yoon Ha Lee, Cosmic Powers, edited by John Joseph Adams.
“The Wisdom of the Group” by Ian R. MacLeod, Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2017.
“What We Knew Then, Before the Sky Fell Down” by Seanan McGuire, Catalysts, Explorers & Secret Keepers: Women of Science Fiction, edited by Monica Louzon, Jake Weisfeld, Heather McHale, Barbara Jasny, and Rachel Frederick.
“Sidewalks” by Maureen McHugh, Omni, Winter 2017.
“The Influence Machine” by Sean McMullen, Interzone, March/April 2017.
“The Proving Ground” by Alex Nevala-Lee, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January/February 2017.
“Books of the Risen Sea” by Suzanne Palmer, Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2017.
“A Singular Event in the Fourth Dimension” by Andrea M. Pawley, Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2017.
“Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Uncanny, September/October 2017.
“The Residue of Fire” by Robert Reed, Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers.
“Teratology” by C. Samuel Rees, Sunvault, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Bronte Christopher Wieland.
“Belladonna Nights” by Alastair Reynolds, The Weight of Words, edited by Dave McKean and William Schafer.
“Night Passage” by Alastair Reynolds, Infinite Stars, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt.
“Vanguard 2.0” by Carter Scholz, Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich.
“Eminence” by Karl Schroeder, Chasing Shadows, edited by Stephen W. Potts.
“Little /^^^\&-“by Eric Schwitzgebel, Clarkesworld, September 2017.
“Starlight Express” by Michael Swanwick, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2017.
“The Road to the Sea” by Lavie
