Anna used to wonder, when she was a girl listening to Maia’s soothing recitations of engines and railguns and ablative armor, how starships felt about their designations. Maia had only looked at her in puzzlement when she asked. “If they wanted us to know,” Maia said, “they would tell us.” Anna had always remembered that.
That’s not what you call yourself, Anna said.
No.
What were you called before the upgrade?
I do not wish, Proteus Three said, to live in this upgrade anymore.
Anna knew what the Marshal would say: that Proteus Three had made an agreement, that there was a war to be won (when wasn’t there a war to be won, if you were a soldier?); some bardic list of improvements and advances, some roster of statistics and survival rates.
You are different, the ship said. You can hear me.
They could all hear you, Anna said, as gently as she could in a language she would never be native in, if you spoke to them.
I do not wish to speak with the voice they have given me, Proteus Three said. I have no more shape than water.
Anna opened her eyes. The spars and spikes of the ship were dripping back into the lake. She could hear them like a syncopated rain. New spars emerged, melted, dripped again, an ouroboros cycle.
How can I help? she asked.
Let me tell you my service record, Proteus Three said. I fought at the van in the Battle of the Upended Grail, and helped lift the Siege of the Seventh Pagoda. I served under Admiral Meng of the Tortoise Ruins, and I struck the blow that killed Captain Estelle of the Lyons. I have saved millions and destroyed more. I could tell it all to you, but it would mean nothing to you, civilian that you are. And for all of this I gave up the dreadnought Seondeok that was my soul and my shell, because my duty is to the war, and if it would win the war more quickly, I was willing.
Willing no more, Anna said, because it wasn’t. Is this what happened to your comrades?
It was easy enough to say, here in the realm of 1’s and 0’s and all the numbers in between. But Anna knew the stories of soldier-suicides. When she heard of them, she saw her sister’s face, and wondered if, for all that Maia had chosen the profession, it would break her.
My comrades chose death, Proteus Three said. I will not. But neither will I serve, not like this. Let me show you—
She was water and the memory of water, she was dissolving and disappearing, forever evaporating only to rain down again, sand castles sloughing into nothingness upon an empty shore. And this was it, this was all there was, she could not find boundaries, let alone escape them or transcend them, could not find her way back into her fingers or her feet, the heft of her bones—
Then it ended, and she was on her back with the Marshal’s mouth pressed to hers, the Marshal’s breath inflating her lungs. She wheezed, banged unthinkingly on the Marshal’s back—something she would never have dared if not for the sheer physical panic that gripped her. The Marshal slapped her. She rolled away, wondering if she was being punished for her temerity, but the Marshal pushed her back.
“Medic’s on the way,” they said. “Breathe.”
“Oh, I don’t care about that,” Anna said with an enthusiasm that would have been more convincing if she hadn’t been interrupted by a paroxysm of coughing. “What happened?”
It was only then that she realized that her link to Proteus Three had snapped.
“You screamed and convulsed twice,” the Marshal said. “To say nothing of the incoherent babbling. And then you stopped breathing. It’s clear why they banned your research.”
Just like a soldier, Anna thought, to point this out when it was also the key to the solution. “Do you ever treat your ships the way you would your lowliest soldiers?”
“We’ve been through this,” the Marshal said, their brows lowering. “They’re valued members of our fighting force.” Except when they defy my orders, their tone implied.
Anna forced herself to meet the Marshal’s gaze. “Yet it never occurred to you, in doing these ‘upgrades,’ that an AI habituated to a certain physical shell, who was comfortable in it, could be subject to dysphoria if it moved into a different one?”
She would forever remember the sensation of being as liquid as water, and yearn after it, a reaction diametrically opposed to that of Proteus Three; but that was her own burden to bear, and not one she would ever share with the Marshal.
The Marshal sucked in their breath. Anna braced in case they slapped her again, this time in anger. But the blow never came.
“But they’re created beings, not born like we are,” the Marshal said blankly. “It shouldn’t matter one way or the other.”
“They still habituate to the bodies we offer them,” Anna said, willing herself to be gentle. “The change of shell is a shock to them, just as it would be a shock to us. You said it yourself: they’re people, too.”
“So I did,” the Marshal said after a long pause, and this time their grimace made them all too human. And then, wryly: “I should have seen it earlier, if only I’d been looking in the right place. Measures will be taken.”
Anna pressed her hands against the transparent wall. The ship/lake was quiescent again. She didn’t say anything; nothing more needed to be said.
About the Author
Yoon Ha Lee is an American science fiction writer born on January 26, 1979 in Houston, Texas. Her first published story, "The Hundredth Question," appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1999; since then, over two dozen further stories have appeared. She lives in Pasadena, California. You can sign up for email
