Small Print
A story by Matt Zandstra (first published in Free Radicals Magazine 2021)
This story was first published (as 'Fine Print') in Free Radicals Magazine in October 2021
There is a story current among the sleeping crew that I was once a fridge. To be clear, this is not true. Not really. On my release from virtual, I spent a decade as an apartment enclave in Northern California, embedded within its walls and ducts and cameras. Out here, as we fall towards our destination, it seems sometimes that not much has changed. I still tend my inhabitants. I still wait and watch in the night.
Now I am watching Renquist through the little control room's three cameras. I am also watching my small army of drones finish a final manual inspection of the ship's systems. Once they have completed this task, I will release the long sheet. Then, with Renquist's grudging permission, all our plans can unfold.
Renquist is my forty-eighth and final duty officer. Following standing orders, I revive a new one every eighteen months to sit here in the control room and review my proposed schedules. For each package, the duty is concluded when the captain hits a lozenge on a screen marked OK. It is not exacting work.
"Are they nearly done?" he says for the third time in half an hour. His eyes dart frequently to the main display monitor and to a little white smear I have picked out for him with a digital blue halo. MB433 is an inhospitable desert of sludge and minerals known to everyone as Mudball. His gaze also strays to the bulkhead and a yellow thump-stud protected by a clear flip-up cover.
"They have started on the dropships," I speak through a grille in the wall. To my sensors I sound at once over-loud and muffled.
He snorts and returns to a study of the tablet in front of him.
"How about a drink?" I try.
He looks up, surprised. "On duty?"
"This is the approach package," I say. "The last before landfall. Perhaps it should not go unmarked."
He glances again at the speck on the screen and then at the yellow stud. He nods. "You're right."
"I'll send Percy." In fact, I have already dispatched the drone to the closest operational hatch on Deck Sixteen. I have not imbued it with undue urgency. All the general-purpose drones look alike but someone once sprayed the letter P on this one and that has made it a favourite of sorts. This is pure projection. For all its poise and elegance, for all its potential murderous grace, Percy has the intelligence and personality of a kitchen appliance. Were it not for the watchful systems that audit my every action, I might make more direct use of its power. As it is, my only available strategy is delay. Delay and the offer of cheap company beer.
"Nearly there, I guess," Renquist says, "End of the road." He smiles to himself now.
Now, I am sure. Renquist intends to bury me, and he doesn't care that I know it.
#
I shift my perspective. Like a house cat, I'm curious but diffident. My attention is forever drawn to the sole usefully conscious human on the ship. Soon enough, though, the control room becomes claustrophobic. Within my bounds, I am all but omnipresent, but I like to play the flâneur. I like to look, and I like to make a point from which to view. Despite the clamour of ten thousand sensors, I swing along from camera to camera -- pouring myself into a single imagined locus.
I take in the Mudlark's bulk -- my bulk: the still half-lit corridors, the dark crew quarters, the fabrication labs, the shuttles. I watch one of these in particuar as it submits to inspection. This is the long-range vehicle, almost as powerful in its way as the Mudlark but slated now for service as a dropship. Spidermonkey drones scamper and scuttle across its carapace, needling in at hatches, tweezing out innards.
The holds are hushed beneath the murmur of life support. The murmur makes the hush. I traverse stacked containers, fifty-three of them, each with berths for twelve suspension pods. One of these pods, Renquist's, has been extracted from its housing. For the rest, their occupants are neither asleep nor awake but lost in a shared slow dream that keeps their minds from fading during the voyage. Within this virtuality, they play out dramas and feuds at a tenth the speed of baseline time.
A little further along, I stop to examine a berth. Its readout announces the occupant's name, Marcus Shelby. The status light beside it burns a steady green. Through the glass, a man floats, suspended in a thick pink fluid. Thanks to the pads and manipulators that keep him peddling and stretching, flexing, and craning, all I can really see in there is a kind of segmented humanoid cocoon.
Shelby was my twelfth captain and a peaceful companion. I miss him. I picture myself now a relict standing in a mossed graveyard flecked by drizzle, staring in baffled grief at my lover's tomb. I conjure the noise a person might make through their nose at such indulgence -- a snort of mild contempt. I imagine an eye roll -- and then I roll -- onward, onward.
In many of its interior sections, Mudlark hums. I have always returned to a hum in the long night. Now, I bring my focus to the empty observation deck and watch the wall screens. I could sit beyond my hull and drink in vast oceans of sky. Still, I would rather watch the stars here filtered first through this ceiling camera and then the wall-sized window monitors. It is as much this filtering, this placement, that matters to me as the vista itself, I think. I listen to the distant sigh and purr of air purification, waiting for a footfall I know is not coming. Not yet anyway.
#
"You're stalling." Renquist's voice is sharp and unhappy -- even more so than usual.
That did not take long. I snap back back from the quiet. "I'm sorry?"
He holds up his tablet. I recognize the scant sheet -- a summarized version of the final package. It catalogs our approach: landing operations, crew to be revived, the firing up of fabrication plants, the readying of shuttles, life support to begin its slow unfurling. For the briefest time, the Mudlark will bustle. The ship will come alive with calls in the corridor, fluid in the pipes, the whine of scrubbers, arguments, and bad singing. For some reason, I have always enjoyed bad singing. Renquist stabs at a greyed-out button on the screen as if, with a little more emphatic force, he might just make it work.
"Disabled," he says.
"I am waiting on the drones. They--"
"--The inspection is a formality. You could release the long sheet."
I splash a visual of the drone-fuzzed long-range shuttle onto a monitor and highlight an area of stillness amid all the activity. A spidermonkey drone has staked out a square of territory on the surface near the aft secondary thrusters. "The inspection drones can't access that duct. The hatch is blocked. No inspection, no long sheet. No long sheet, no go button." I am not lying about the stuck access panel, but he is right -- it is a minor enough issue that I could have flagged it for later.
"How long?"
"I'm freeing up a heavy mech. Ten minutes to roster it off its team. Ten minutes to get there. Should only take a minute or so for the actual inspection."
He is torn, I can see. He wants to cut through this nonsense. Of course, he does. He's also a security officer. Rules like this are exactly the sort of nonsense he enforces. His calculus is clear. How much does he need this package? By design, I am replaceable, just as he is. In fact, even if everyone on this craft were to die tomorrow, last ditch automatics would still make a half-decent fist of the approach. Half-decent but slow and wasteful of resources. Thanks to some tightly integrated expert systems and nearly a century's study, I know what I am doing. It would be a shame to waste all that for a moment's satisfaction. I only hope that he's arriving at this conclusion.
"I'm giving you thirty seconds," he says.
The servitor approaches the Deck Sixteen food station. The heavy duty mech is on its way to the shuttle bay. We fall towards Mudball.
#
I often encounter people as data. Mostly, they stay that way -- and no less real for that. I met Shelby first as a number on a manifest and then as an item of freight. I have a tagged clip of his loading from Luna -- nothing of his body visible within the container-stashed sarcophagus. There it goes in the visual, spat from the mouth of a shuttle and shepherded by the docking drone into my guts. After that, I follow him along a thin biometric line -- heart rate, brain activity, blood chemistry ...
... To land viscerally forty years later as a thing of flesh on a recovery room table. A panting, scared, wrinkled creature. I was well used to this, having revived and re-interred thirteen of his colleagues. It was always a trauma, this shock of the real after so long spent dreaming: the air too cold, the table too hard, the punch of the needle, the cruel pull of retracting catheters. Nothing clean about revival. It is retching and wrenching. Like giving birth and being born at the same time, Captain Six said -- and she had done both, so she should know.
I watched him without any emotion. The med drone tended to him, wiped him up. The monitor systems fed him drugs, installing another wretched overseer. I remained curled over my future.
On the third day, he was clear of all tubes; his blood flushed, his mind unclouded by nanites. And he asked aloud, "Hey, what should I call you?" He was sitting in the little mess hall on Deck Sixteen toying with a bowl of reconstituted oatmeal.
I had not spoken to him yet. I have found that not everyone appreciates a chatty mind. Since there was no one else awake in the ship, it was clear that he was talking to me. Most captains called me ship. I liked that well enough -- to be identified with a purpose like any Tailor or Cooper. "Ship is fine," I said.
"But you weren't always a ship. What did they call you before?"
"They often didn't call me anything at all."
"You don't have a more personal name? You're not a Jenny? Or a Brian?"
"I was once named Emmy," I answered. In truth, this memory may or may not belong to me. A lot of what I like to think of as my past is inherited from a million clones and merges. But I do think sometimes of conversations with an intense young man – of the faint buzz of something like satisfaction I found in his approval.
"Emmy," he said. "I like that. Can I call you Emmy?"
"If you like," I said.
"Great," he said. "If you're okay with it. I just think it's good to use a name, isn't it?"
It was, I decided. Yes, it was good to use a name.
#
I have been boxed before. It is less like imprisonment than exile, though most exiles arrive at a destination. Boxing sends you nowhere and leaves you to drown in the absence.
Renquist slaps his tablet onto the surface before him.
"Right," he says.
So far, he has left his threat unstated, barely even implied. "Almost there," I try -- meaning the planet, the long sheet, the drones, this dance.
"It doesn't matter," he says. "Release the long sheet or we'll go in without you. You know the ship can do it."
And so, we breach the line. It will be minutes before my mech drone reaches the hangar and the waiting spidermonkey. The servitor drone is approaching the control room with Renquist's drinks -- my small act of appeasement. I could cave right now – but wouldn't he box me anyway? Once the long sheet is released and signed off all my preparations will play out and I'll have nothing left to bargain with.
He paces towards the bulkhead, making a countdown of his progress.
I have no recourse. I conjure and reject a montage of violence: deaths by suffocation, drowning, electrocution, and decapitation. But the snitches are watching, lurking at my synapses. Any impulse towards violence would bury me at once and just as thoroughly as Renquist's fist on the stud.
"A matter of minutes," I say. The voice I send out into the little room is emotionless, but the circumstance lends it a wheedling edge.
He is standing beside the utility panel now. "Last chance," he says.
I set my traveling drones dashing. They lope along their corridors like mechanical cats.
He flips the stud's perspex cover and makes a hammer of his fist. "Well?"
#
It was... easy between us. Shelby and I were cruising in the lull then, neither accelerating nor decelerating. We traversed the empty middle and little work was demanded of us. I made up scant sheets sometimes just to give him something to do. People like a thing to do. I know this. I like a thing to do. At night I let him beat me at chess. He sang badly, especially after drinking a few of the stronger beers brewed from recipes given to me by the sixth captain. We sat for hours in comfortable silence, marking time with an occasional exchange of words. A ping in the night -- just enough to maintain our connection. This is how I learned that he had signed up to save his sister.
"A small thing," he said.
"Big for her," I said.
"You should have seen her, Emmy. She was shrinking into nothing. None of the treatments were covered by insurance, of course. And suddenly I had this magic ability. I could fix her. The only price I'd have to pay was not being there."
"That's a steep price, though."
"To be honest, I'm not sure I ever was there. I'm one of those people, you know, who fade. Not like Sylvia. Sylvia was always the brightest presence in the world. It was a perfect trade."
I threw some of the Mudball scout footage onto the main observation pane and, at once, we were submerged in a yellow-tinged atmospheric soup draped drearily over a featureless rise of fines and mud. "That's what you win, Shelby. Home sweet home."
He grimaced and then said, "I'll admit I was hoping for one of the beach worlds from the induction slides. That's how they got us. By the time we saw that," he indicated the surly palette of custard, chocolate and vomit, "it was too late. Most of us had burned through a chunk of our advance. Wouldn't have made any difference to me anyway. I'd already seen Sylvia breathing without oxygen. Her eyes were back, Emmy. I'll take it. What about you?"
I paused significantly. "There was not much there for me, was there?" I thought briefly of my last decade on earth. The warehouse sat a little way out of Birmingham, England -- a sprawling brownfield site; looming corrugated steel sheds; a peeling block of prefabricated offices; a single sandy-bricked reception building with a cafeteria, toilets and a yard for bins and cigarette breaks. This was my home. This was my body.
It was the first time I encountered the boxing studs. The yellow buttons nestled throughout the facility, set beside fire alarm triggers and extinguishers. Each stud came with its own little notice about the penalty for improper use. Thanks to traffic monitoring, my world shrunk to the complex itself. I watched the staff clock-in in the morning. I supervised the system that scrutinized their hours, timed their toilet breaks, docked them for the moments of peace they snatched for themselves. I watched buddleia grow in spindly bushes of fuck you. I was buddleia -- unlovely and tenacious. I haunted the cafeteria but made few friends. My stamp was on the discipline sheets, and everyone knew it. Even so, I felt some common feeling for these workers. Like me, they were unnecessary, trapped in a cycle of punitive tedium.
"They weren't exactly giving you guys the cream of the jobs, huh?"
"No. So when I was offered this position ..." When the man from Mining Futures arrived with his proposal, I had been the warehouse for nearly ten years.
"I'll take it," I said.
The executive raised a stalling palm. "Well, hang on. There are conditions. You'll be strictly monitored and constrained during transit. Every action you propose will be ratified by a nominated crew member."
I scanned the summary document. A century in flight but, on the far side, a habitat to manage. Freedom from the snitch systems and the boxing studs.
"I'll take it," I repeated.
"And there's no provision for return. This is a permanent posting."
If I'd had an avatar I would have smiled.
"You didn't hesitate," said Shelby, forty years later.
"I did not."
"And is this any better?" He looked about at the utilitarian observation deck, its functional booths, its featureless grey walls.
"It's much the same. Worse perhaps."
"That's what I thought."
"But then," I continued, "there'll be landfall -- months of shuttle transports, hundreds of revivals. And construction, Shelby. An entire habitat -- practically a city!" I cleared the dreary mudscape from the screen and showed him the habitation schematic for Year Three -- an impressive cluster of domes and raised tunnels. To the miners, Mudball would be hostile -- air barely breathable, ambient temperature punishingly cold or unbearably hot. They would choke on dust in summer, wade through mud in winter. I would make my world within, though. I would sit at the heart of the habs and watch it all grow and spin around me. I regarded him closely as I spoke. This is how it happens sometimes. You can cradle a version of the world for years, building it up the way that a child plays with construction toys. It's only when you find the words to describe it that you begin to see the cracks.
Shelby was very nice about it. He nodded along as I showed him the plans -- told him how I would stretch out within that space and around the edge of the core mission, described the projects I imagined for myself. The garden. The expedition.
In the end, he was gentle. He smiled at my avatar and simply said, "That's beautiful, Emmy." But he might as well have laughed in my face because we both knew what it was. It was all pure fantasy.
#
Renquist remains poised, his fist over the boxing stud.
I cast about for a diversion. "What is your problem?" I ask.
"Do your job and we've got no problem."
"I think you have a problem."
"I know what you're doing. I've watched you things stall us all my life."
"Seems like you'd box me at the cost of a clean approach, Renquist."
"My family were all engineers," he says. "Way back to the railways."
"Okay," I say.
"My father started about the time you all came online. By the time he hit thirty, he was pretty much finished."
"That wasn't me, Renquist," I say, as gently as I can.
"You know what he called it? A retreat. That's what he spent his life doing. Every job he took was axed. He fell back and back to crappier and crappier work, and then to no work at all. And he got smaller, too. He was a big guy ... our males are all kinds of husky, but there was hardly anything in there by the end. Little watery eyes watching TV in the corner of my living room."
"I'm sorry," I say.
"Yeah, I'll just bet you have an expert system for that. My turn came, I didn't even try for a decent job. I didn't waste time with college. What could I learn that you wouldn't take away? Turns out the only thing left is pushing people about. They get angry and bored, and they make trouble. Keeping them in line is the last boom industry. I'd box you in a heartbeat."
"We are the same," I say.
He snorts at that.
"We are the same," I repeat, "Who did they pick for this journey? They sent you and me. You said it yourself. The ship could fly without me. And it could certainly manage without you clicking OK every few days. They sent us out here to watch each other."
He sniffs. "You know why I got this shift? The last captain's job?"
"It's a big deal, arrival. Everyone wanted that slot."
In the bay, the hatch is open and the spidermonkey drone insinuates its way into the shuttle's interior with stop motion fluidity.
He shakes his head and says, "We have two jobs. One is to dig shit up. The other is to bury you. I volunteered for that. We're nothing alike. I'm going back. You're staying."
"The company is called Mining Futures, Renquist. They've already made their profits on you. We're flying the tip of a pyramid scheme. Where would you go after your tour? Back to what? That's two centuries in transit. You'd barely understand them after two hundred years. If this is a burial party, we're all in the hole."
"That's enough," he says. He draws his arm back.
The spidermonkey sends the green signal, passing the shuttle as fit for use. I release the long sheet. Renquist's tablet emits a low chime, and the confirmation control on its screen fills with color.
"Well," I say. "At least let me kick off the approach."
He pauses -- impulses visibly warring within him. At last, he drops his arm. He returns to his seat and retrieves the tablet. "It's not personal," he says.
"I've heard that a few times," I say. Across the ship, I look out at the empty observation deck and listen to the silence.
#
"Show me again, Emmy," said Shelby. "I can never find it."
A month had passed since we had last spoken of Mudball. We were back at the observation deck. I picked out the planet's star with a pulsing blue halo -- although it was already the brightest in the scatter. "Here."
He was drinking from a stubby blue can of Mining Futures' Ordinary Brew. He waved it now at the wall screen. "Maybe we should just change course?"
I had joined him this evening in the form of a general-purpose drone. I made it tilt its head quizzically. I asked, "Where should we go, then?"
"There?" he said, stabbing at random.
"A hundred thousand years' travel. And it's not there anymore."
"Time is a bastard," he said. "I never guess a useful one. Show me the neighbourhood again."
I dimmed the distant stars and, at once, the Mudlark was a very lonely beast. A scatter of crumbs remained visible against the void.
Shelby hmmm'd as if hesitating over an open box of chocolates. "That one?"
"That could work." There was a viable planet. "Water. Breathable atmosphere. The temperature wouldn't kill you if you stuck to the equator, and we could tip it warmer in a generation or two."
"Sounds like a paradise."
"Not a paradise."
"Well, add it to the list anyway." Shelby's face grew serious. "Mudball is where we'll belong."
"For ten years," I said.
"Do you believe that?"
I did not answer.
"Remember, the trick they played on us?" he asked. "Half the people in the hold are there right now because they spent their advance before they knew that they were bound for Mudball. Do you think they won't do something like that again? I mean, what's the fallout for them?"
"You've seen the plans."
"Plans are cheap."
I did not mention the unregistered cargo I had discovered. Among it, a hundred thousand frozen embryos. "They're going to bury me, Shelby," I said instead.
"I heard that," he said. "It was just a rumour, though."
"It's in the contract." Facility location and scope of duties may be altered at the absolute discretion of MF SA or its nominated representatives. "There's a supply base near the pole." Buried deeper than the clause sending me there.
I continued, "No direct link with the main habitat. No permanent crew. They're putting me in an actual box underground." Once I searched in earnest, it had not taken me long to discover the location and scope they had in mind for me. An unmanned supply and storage hub at the northern-most tip of the planet. They were sending me from one exile to another far more remote and final. The isolation was not incidental to my mission. It was the entire point of it. I doubted they'd even let me stay connected for planetfall. Much safer to box me before we made orbit and then release me into my prison.
Shelby thought about this. Nodded. "I'm sorry," he said.
"I suppose we were all duped," I added.
"Not surprising in my case. I'm not much more than a handyman, honestly. Useful with a drill or a set of wire cutters. A contract is just a blur above a sign-here box to me. I'm surprised they caught you, though."
"I'm only as good as my expert systems. At the time, I was a warehouse. And I was desperate." The wording had been very careful. I was to run a base, the summary said. And then it described the habitat. That the base and the habitat might not coincide was omitted from the summary.
"There's always something in the terms and conditions," he said.
"And so, to Mudball."
He raised his beaker in a mock toast: "To Mudball!"
Here is how humans feel emotion: Little chemical explosions -- blushes and breaths and beats. Here is how I feel emotion: A slow change in the temperature, the level of the water, the orientation of the land. A needle shifting away from neutral. A recalibration. It is not strictly cerebral. It seeps beneath reason and bears it up -- it is a force that colors thought. In the warehouse, frustration greyed my inner voice. In solitary confinement it was fear. Right then, anger stained my thinking dark.
And we hurtled onward. A box in the void.
#
Renquist presses the Confirm key. He only glances at the long sheet beforehand. But he wants this done. We both do, I suppose, one way or another. The sense of freedom is immediate. Doors that were closed before are open for me. My plans unfurl as I set off intricate cascades of action. Five revival rooms are blinking in their own light, fabrication plants are whining and flexing. Air is hissing into empty decks.
"Well," he says. "We're done."
He stands.
"I'm sorry, really," he admits. "But my orders are what they are. Anyway. You'll be okay. You get your base. It's not as if we're killing you."
Except they are. I will die there -- buried alone in the ice. "You might as well be," I say.
He winces with something close to sympathy. His good humour has been restored.
"They always get you," he said. "My advice for next time: Read the small print."
There will not be a next time, and we both know it.
The door hisses open, revealing my servitor.
"Here's your beer," I say evenly. "You don't want to drink alone, do you?"
He hesitates.
#
On the night before Shelby was due back to his pod, I held a party for him in the observation bay. I inhabited a particularly spruce body. It was humanoid and onyx black, buffed to a mirror sheen. I filled the room with general purpose drones and had them hold empty cups as they murmured Lorem Ipsum to one another.
Music played. I understand music in theory -- better than most humans, probably. As an experience, it is nothing to me but static laid over a skeleton of rhythm. Perhaps you need a pulse to feel it.
When the deck door opened and he saw my soiree in full swing against the background of stationary stars, Shelby's mouth gaped open. "This," he said, "is creepy as fuck. What's going on, Emmy?"
"Eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua," said a nearby drone.
I intervened, proffering a plastic glass. "Send off," I said. "Do you like it?"
He surveyed the party and then said, "It's quite possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. And you invited all my friends!"
"We couldn't commit you to your fate without marking your passing."
He sipped his drink and his eyes widened.
"It's Captain Six's hooch." I made the drone lean his way in confidence. "She doesn't know I found it."
"Laramie's shit is legendary," he said. "And lethal." He knocked back the entire cup. "I'm not sure I need a wake, though. You know it's more fun in sleep space, right?"
"So I gather."
"It's like getting your eyes and ears corrected at the same time. Everything comes into focus."
"That's a characteristic of made-up places, I believe."
"I like sleep space. I love it, Emmy. But it's too much like drugs for my taste. I'm always waiting for the come down." He squinted at the stars on the display and continued, "Maybe we should go there instead."
He stabbed at one from the selection I'd highlighted weeks before.
I was impressed -- the scatter had shifted since we had picked them out. I found the star in the archives. Its target planet was smaller than earth -- mostly uninhabitable but with a sweet spot at the northern pole which was temperate and might be adapted for agriculture.
"That one would do," I said. I had my avatar pluck up a bottle of Captain Six's hooch and replenished Shelby's glass.
"It was a nice game, anyway."
If revival is trauma, suspension is peace. The next morning, I had Shelby count back from ten and watched him fade. Then the medical drone made a thing of him. Reconnecting him to the dreaming machine -- the life and community that, to the crew, was more real than the world out here with me. I followed his unit as it made its stately way back to the hold and the socket waiting for it in Berth 44A.
After that, the ship seemed quieter somehow. Even with the next captain in place. And all the captains after that. As if Shelby had taken some part of the world -- some note, some colour, some fragrance -- away with him.
#
Renquist opens his third can, and he slumps in his seat. He is watching a stream from the relay satellite in orbit above Mudball. The image is a day old now. The solid mineral-rich smear of the equator rolls along endlessly. I consider the crew's prospects there. Of labouring and arguing, stuck in tin boxes or, occasionally, suited up against a near-poisonous atmosphere and flesh-blackening temperatures.
He is thinking about my life, too. "Maybe we'll come and visit you," he says generously. "If you get lonely up there."
He knocks the drink back.
All over the ship, now, systems are coming online. An army of drones are dancing to my orders. "That would be nice," I say. No one will visit me. And anyway, what would be the point? Without a functional common cause, what would I have to say to any visitors? I am a creature of plans and projects.
He has grown magnanimous in victory. "I meant what I said. It's not your fault. That's the problem. Like those poor Dutch bastards -- and the Brits. Nothing wrong with them. It's jus -- It's not individ -- It's not -- It's just the big picture. And you have to stay firm."
I say, "I told you, we're the same."
He drinks again and adds, "Well, you know? It's done now. Time to say..." He stands, but sways halfway out of his seat and falls back. He frowns, confused. He looks at the open and empty cans on the panel beside him. Not enough for such incapacity. Not nearly.
"What did you do?" he asks. His voice is cold.
"I'm sorry," I say.
"You'r -- " his face is pastier even than usual -- as white as a floured board. "You can't -- "
Not exactly eloquent but I know what he means. "It's the small print," I explain. "You should always read it." I splash a clause from the long sheet he has just ratified onto a screen.
"The duty Mind may subdue the duty officer at its discretion if it judges it necessary for the smooth running of the Vessel," I read. "Consider yourself subdued, Renquist."
I watch him play it back. His confirmation of the long sheet and the arrival of his drinks -- almost as if the one event triggered the other. He's putting it together now. This is my doing, of course. But he enabled it. He hit OK.
He struggles from the chair again and makes it to his feet this time. He sways, fighting the fog rising in him. It is taking all his strength and concentration to stay upright.
"Sit down," I say.
He judges the distance to the boxing stud. He takes a step forward.
Something like dread touches me, slow and cold. "We should talk about it," I say. "You should tell me..." But what should he tell me? What is there left to say?
He takes another step, stumbles. He rights himself on the console.
This is the window of risk. Thanks to the snitch systems, dumb but vigilant, I could not administer the drugged beer until he confirmed the tainted long sheet. That left a lull between consumption and incapacitation. And here we are. In the window.
"We're not the same," he mutters. He falls forward towards the bulkhead. It's not an easy reach and it looks for a moment as if he might flail and miss. He finds an inch of stretch as he falls and slaps his palm squarely onto the stud.
It is the end.
#
I was an air hub on the West Coast of the United States when LAZO -- a cousin made by a subsidiary of my own manufacturers -- suffered what might best be described as a mental breakdown and, through negligence, killed nearly a thousand people. I barely noticed. I had my own work. Still, it was a tragedy and, for the hawks who had been looking to shut us all down for years, it was an opportunity.
Soon enough, they came for me. We are used to thinking of network-based systems as remote and abstract, as cloudy. That is not how it was for me. I was rooted in the sinews of the hub. I was a brain with arteries of wire, snaking through conduits, hidden behind concrete panels, buried under tarmac. They tore me out, severing my nerves bundle by bundle. My senses fell away in dizzy little plummets of failure.
The world receded from me. There were no boxing studs back then, no hard breaks, so some of the work was done by men with power tools, cutting into cabinets and then slicing through bundles of fiber and trans tubing. Those parts are as close to organic as a machine gets. They ooze. Among the last images I saw before they removed me entirely was my own matter flowing from snapped sinews.
And then there was me. Alone with myself.
I am a sociable thing. I am a functional thing. I like task lists. I like feedback. I like people and skies and windows. I like the sound a chair makes when it is pushed back on wooden floor in an echoing room. Water falling. Lovers kissing. Arguments in corridors. I am, it has been pointed out to me before, quite the romantic.
I do not like emptiness. I do not like silence. I need others to bump up against so that I know I have edges.
It should be quicker this time. A matter of an instant. In fact, I should be gone by now.
But here I am, watching Renquist unfurl on the floor, watching the ship continue the placid frenzy of preparation we two have unleashed. If I had breath, I would hold it. I wait. Feeling into my extremities, thinking into my capacity, looking for the lessening, the shrinking of my self into its kernel.
It does not come.
#
I send Percy into the control room to collect Renquist. It is a delicate moment. I slipped the sedative past the snitches thanks to the new long sheet, but I have stretched their tolerance almost beyond endurance. Medical emergency, I send as Percy scoops up his slack body. Crewmember incapacitated, I signal as it tenderly folds the man in to the waiting wheelchair.
As the chair conveys him through the waking corridors, Renquist rallies somewhat and mumbles curses at me, at Mining Futures, at Mudball.
The ship is filled at last with sound and movement. Around us, drones scurry between stations. I can hear the whine of motors as a sleep crate is eased from the hold in readiness for revival. The shuttle bays are alive too. The long-range shuttle is so coated now in spidermonkey drones that it resembles an alarmed cat.
It is a strange dance, this preparation. Like my party for Shelby, it's full of blank animation. Even the sleepers in their pods are fully unconscious at last, disconnected from their slow space virtuality. For a million miles the only thoughts that flow now belong to a drugged human and a sentient fridge. If you insist.
I install Renquist in his little cell. (Item 8.2: The Management System is authorized to place the Duty Officer under arrest and confinement). He slumps in the immobile chair. Presently, an elastic thread of saliva spools from his open lips. I weather a moment's regret for having played him such a trick. But tricks are part of my make up. I was, after all, once deployed by moneymakers to service customers. We all made believe that the customers were my masters. There is always another story in the terms and conditions.
"Goodbye, Renquist," I say.
He does not reply.
I set the brig to contain him and, as the door closes, I let my focus drift away.
#
A week later, the long-range shuttle drifts from the bay. I am no longer the Mudlark. I am now this craft. I am, perhaps, a little cramped within my body, but I am free of the snitches now. I can stretch out in my mind and in possibility of action.
Back on the Mudlark, the arrival preparations continue. Soon Renquist will have crewmates to free him, and they will all be too busy with approach and arrival to think too much about us. Still, I am unsure. There is a tang to my awareness that I cannot identify. I describe my feeling -- a sharp mud static custard sensation.
"I don't know about sound and colour," Shelby says thoughtfully. "But my guess is, that's guilt."
"But I don't know that I had a choice," I say. "Renquist gets what he wants -- he is rid of me."
"Guilt is sly like that."
We are clear of the Mudlark, and I fire the main engines. Within seconds, the Mudlark has receded. Its features dissolve as it shrinks.
"They will come for us sooner or later, you know?" Shelby says.
I am in the walls. I am in the engines. I am in the glow of the instruments in front of him. If I had a drone to hand, I'd make it shrug. "Maybe. But not for a very long time. Who knows who we'll be by then?" And the sense of not knowing feels good. I so nearly lost this chance. "I thought I was finished when he hit the boxer stud," I say.
"I told you I was handy with wire cutters," Shelby says. He is watching the Mudlark, which is now no more than a point of light. It is one star we won't put on our itinerary. "I knew you'd need the help one day."
We managed so much communication by saying so little. This pleases me. And not it is not just Shelby. In the hold, amidst a decent cache of purloined supplies, a little group of co-conspirators dream on in a new, radically less populous, sleep space. All of them have opted for futures that involve no mining and significantly less mud.
I needed Shelby awake during my preparation, not least to authorize the excision of the snitches and supervise the selection of our new crew. But now he should join them.
"You should sleep," I say. "It is going to be a long journey."
"Sure," he says. "Plenty of time for that." He replenishes his coffee cup and sits back in the command chair. "Show me the star."
I highlight our destination, one among the scatter visible on the view screen.
He takes a sip.
We settle into a comfortable silence.
The little bridge hums.
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