I’d also gone deep in the Core General archives and pulled the most archaic human ayatanas I could find, and a couple of systers recorded around the time of first contact with my species.
It’s generally contraindicated to load more than a couple of ayatanas at once, but I’m a trained professional with years of experience. Kids, don’t try this at home.
Inside my head, the methane breathers in particular were having fits about what, to them, was a blinding, flesh-melting level of light and a profoundly unfriendly hot environment. Balancing that and keeping myself alert in the confusing, constantly altering environment of the microbots and the creaking ship took up a lot of my attention. Managing my pain levels—they’re chronic—took up a little more.
So I didn’t notice that we hadn’t heard from Sally in quite some time—not until Tsosie said her name, and nobody answered.
I stopped with a foot in midair. Because when somebody else says something is broken you can’t be totally sure until you try it yourself, I idiotically echoed, “Sally?”
The silence was immediately twice as loud.
I put my foot down very gently and groped for our uplink. There was nothing on the other end. Not even the quiet feeling of connection that usually radiates down the senso from a linked AI when you tune into it. For a second, the bottom dropped out of me, and I flailed in the panicked certainty that Sally was gone and we were trapped here on this weird ghost ship, and that all our friends were dead.
I admit it: I am not the galaxy’s best at not immediately producing the worst-case scenario. Fortunately, I’m also aware of this tendency, after years of rightminding and some time in a nice, secure environment, and so I bumped my GABA and serotonin levels up and my cortisol level down and took six deep breaths until the sensation of my heart squeezing tight around a shard of glass eased up somewhat.
The brain is—mostly—an electrochemical meat machine. The fact that you can tune it is why humanity still exists, centians after the Eschaton and the crazy desperate nonsense of those who could afford to escape an Earth we’d declared doomed attempting to save themselves at any cost.
Crazy desperate nonsense like this big old ship I was standing on.
I looked over at Tsosie, and saw his face pinched and his brow dewed with beads of sweat behind the faceplate. He’d stopped moving, too, and when we halted the clicking of the tinkertoy microbots silenced. They were frozen mid-peel, as if somebody had hit pause on the animation.
“What are the odds we’re blocked from coms, and they’re fine up there?” I asked him, trying to sound reasonable. “And they’ll get in touch with us momentarily?”
“If it can be done, Sally and our crew can do it.” He sounded like he believed it, too. Some people just have solid neurochemistry. Or more robust rightminding.
Or less trauma, I supposed.
Maybe I was a little freaked out by the entirely empty ship. Entirely empty, except for one dead person and a weird tinkertoy machine. Entirely empty of the thousands of crew members it was large enough to contain.
“What are the odds that something terrible went wrong and they’re all dead?”
“Have a little faith,” said Tsosie. “Come on. Keep walking. Let’s do our job and trust them to do theirs, what do you say?”
“I don’t know much about faith,” I said to Tsosie, ten steps later.
“What?” he answered, distractedly. He was scanning the lattice construct of microbots warily, and I expected he was as busy pinging Sally as I was.
My brain was building architectures of attack, sabotage, or accident, and I needed to distract it. “What you said about having faith. I never knew how that felt. I guess it’s some kind of neurological defect. I was born without it. Or it got knocked out of me so early I never remember having those feelings. I don’t believe in things. But I believe in Core General. I believe in our mission. I believe that we are here to help people.”
I was, as you have probably diagnosed, babbling. I was also grateful to Tsosie, for providing me with a distraction from the panic that wanted to overwhelm me. The least I could do was talk about trivialities in return.
If they really were trivialities.
He hummed a sound that made me wonder if he’d even heard the second half of what I’d said. “You mean religion, when you say faith? Because I meant, our crew and ship know what they’re doing, and we know that.”
“Nah.” I shook my head inside the hardsuit. And checked my battery levels. The suit had extra backups; it and my exo were still fine.
Tsosie pointed to a hatch in the side wall.
I nodded, and followed him. “Like trust. Like believing in people. Like believing that things will turn out okay. Like… what you said.”
The hatch was an access point. Beyond it was a tunnel that would need us to crawl.
“Let’s save those for after,” I said.
He nodded. “And after we get back in touch with Sally. And her sensor arrays.”
There it was again: that faith that we would get back in touch with Sally. I was having a hard time remembering that she even existed, that we weren’t stranded out here alone with no support.
“I want to put eyes on her,” I said.
“Next hatch. Let’s see if we can find a viewport.”
There had been windows. We’d seen them from the outside. Mirrored to reflect the potentially unforgiving light of space. There weren’t any here, because this was a corridor.
Or were there?
I started inspecting the control panels we passed more carefully.
“This is a personal question,” Tsosie said formally.
I glanced over at him and nodded. The hardsuits fit close enough that you can pick up even a little gesture like that.
“I consent,” I said, so it would be on Sally’s record. If Sally was still out there. If we ever got our link back.
Quit psyching yourself out, Dr. Jens. If
