Sunward, page 4
“Coffee?” asked a voice that was way too close to me. I almost elbowed my little brother in the gut. He dropped the offered bulb. I managed to catch it before it hit the floor. Nothing falls quickly on Luna.
“Thanks, Thad,” I said.
“Welcome home,” said Thaddeus. His immaculate hair looked a little bit mussed, which was both gratifying and worrying. My brother liked to be precise.
I ran one hand through my own hair. It probably needed cutting. Haircuts require gravity, though. I never cut my hair aboard Needle, because I don’t want to inhale the trimmings that would drift around my ship and clog up all the air filters. I suddenly felt extra self-conscious about coming to visit Her Majesty while in need of a haircut. Then I felt horrible for even thinking about haircuts in the aftermath of a disaster.
“What do we know about the shipyards?” I asked Thaddeus. “Accident? Sabotage? Act of war?”
His jaw twitched in a teeth-clenching way. “Those aren’t words to drop casually,” he said. “Even here. Especially here. And right now we don’t know enough.”
“Apologies.” I nodded toward the center of the room. “How is she?”
“Unstoppable,” he said.
“And you?”
“Stoppable,” he admitted, “but I haven’t stopped yet.”
Thaddeus took after Mama Dee. Child of her body. Inheritor of her gifts. He’d stayed home to help bring order to lunacy as an integral part of Her Majesty’s government—the deputy steward of something-or-other—whereas I had caught the sailor’s itch and followed Mama CJ’s footsteps all over the solar system.
“What does she have you working on?” I asked.
“Coordinating volunteers,” he said. “Lots of people are independently suiting up to look for survivors—even though the chances of finding anyone alive at this point are vanishingly small. Nice of them to help us look, I guess, but volunteers keep stumbling into unstable situations and adding to the list of people who need to be rescued. Not helpful. The sunny ones are the worst.”
“Why them in particular?”
Thaddeus shrugged. “They seem determined to reclaim the dead as quickly as they can. Send them out to join the big fleet of funeral ships.”
I felt three different twinges of guilt: a small one for delaying Kuneo’s final wish for a solar cremation, a bigger twinge for desecrating a coffin by stashing an assassin inside, and a really big twinge for my absence when this whole disaster had happened. My home got hurt while I was somewhere else.
“Where have you been?” Thaddeus asked. “You were scheduled to arrive days ago.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Had to go dark for a special delivery.”
“Third-class couriers don’t usually accept special deliveries.”
I ignored him while sipping the last of the coffee.
Her Majesty waved me over, having apparently finished with the Current Urgent Thing.
“Gotta go.” I handed Thad the empty bulb and pushed through the chaos that surrounded Mama Dee.
We didn’t hug, because she was at work. Everyone here depended on her constant projection of godlike calm.
“Hello, Tova,” she said calmly. “Are you well?”
“Hi,” I said. “Well enough. Are you?”
She smiled instead of answering. “If you’re here to stay, then we could use your help. So could your guild, I imagine. They have a temporary courier depot set up in an otherwise bare cavern, and I suspect that it’s desperately understaffed.”
More guilt peppered me like itty-bitty bits of shrapnel. Mama Dee hated my job. She had never understood why her late spouse preferred sailing through the void to savoring hearth and home, and she would never understand why I’m exactly the same.
“I’ll check in with the depot,” I told her, but didn’t promise to stay.
She noticed, of course, but didn’t comment on the omission. “Do you need anything that I can help you with?”
I shouldn’t have answered. Her flawless coffee and the guilt-inducing force field that she always projected combined into a truth serum. “Yes,” I said. “I need to find an expert in robotic cognition.”
Her Majesty’s voice dropped a couple of kelvins. “Both the Makers’ Guild and the Prometheans have more pressing concerns right now, Tova. This isn’t the time for you to play with dolls.”
I looked down. Somewhere under our feet the iron core of Luna blazed in a magma sea, hot from the constant force of internal tides. I looked up. Somewhere overhead the Lunar surface was absolutely cold.
The surface of myself was also cold.
Agatha wasn’t a doll. She wasn’t dead, either. She was a child in need of a doctor—and not a human one. I shouldn’t have bothered to bring up the topic at all.
“Agreed,” I said. “Neither one of us has time for this.”
Another emergency called Her Majesty away. Actual survivors seemed to be breathing inside the wreckage of a fallen freighter. A projected display of the rescue site appeared in the middle of the room. Humans in suits crawled across the hull. No one else did. This time the absence registered.
I looked around for Thaddeus, got his attention, and signed in Starling. “Why are there no bots outside?”
“What?” His Starling was rusty, and he’d failed to parse mine. Thaddeus spent far too much of his time surrounded by sound and breathable air.
I pushed across the room and whispered in his ear. “No bots. Not here. Not out there. Why?”
His jaw clenched again. “Good question.”
“I know it is.”
Thaddeus’s voice changed as though narrating an official statement from a podium. “There are no autonomous machines assisting in surface rescue and salvage efforts because no such machines are currently available.”
“Why not?” I demanded.
He let the gov-speak drop. “The bots are gone. All of them. Every Lunar robot has completely disappeared.”
* * *
It was originally the postmaster general’s idea to turn my ship into a crèche for baby bots.
“You’ve logged too much time alone,” Phoebe told me. “Not good. Expand your crew.”
“Rather not,” I said.
“Please?” she begged. “Choose a copilot and train me up a fledgling courier. Somebody needs to claim your route on the inevitable day that you get bored of it.”
“I won’t get bored.”
“You absolutely will,” Phoebe said. “Take on passengers, maybe?”
“I would rather chew off my own limb.”
She exhaled slowly. “Fine. What about bots?”
“What about them?” I asked.
“Juveniles need to be fostered by another conscious entity. A grown-up to mind them. Each one is basically a mechanical toddler, except you don’t have to worry about them trying to eat something they shouldn’t.”
“Sounds awful,” I said.
“It pays well, though. And each baby bot chassis is adorable by design. Helps foster empathy in their human caregivers.”
At the time I considered myself immune to adorable things. “Would I be training an artificial replacement? Contributing to my own obsolescence?”
She shook her head. “Not at your rates. A bot pilot is much more expensive.”
“I should raise my rates,” I said.
“Then you should let me promote you,” Phoebe countered.
“No.”
“So take this as a side gig. Please? As a favor to me, if nothing else? You need shipmates. Otherwise the void is going to swallow you up and then spit out a slantwise version of you that I will not know how to deal with.”
“Fine,” I said. “Sign me up.”
My first two charges were a pair of twins manufactured on Luna. They had identical base code, identically small bodies, and increasingly divergent personalities as they tried to differentiate themselves from each other.
The twins chose the names Cosmas and Damian. They let it be known that both of them were boys. Cosmas was solemn and soft-spoken. He liked to stand perfectly still and watch the space around him, observing the transit of a dust mote like it was high drama. Damian was a bellowing object in motion, always climbing, jumping, unbuckling his harness in mid-launch, dislocating his own limbs, and gleefully snapping them back into place.
At first I was terrified. These were kids, and one of them was a constant danger to himself. Then I relaxed. This was just how they learned about the world. Besides, it didn’t seem to hurt whenever Damian’s arm came off.
“You’re good at this,” Phoebe said the next time I saw her. She sounded smug.
“Maybe a bit,” I allowed.
Then Damian drowned.
The Needle had few rules, which were as follows: stay away from the engine, the pilot’s chair, the coffee bulbs, and the data stream. That was pretty much it. I myself had zero trouble avoiding the overwhelming distractions of the stream, so I underestimated its siren call. Every broadcast and transmission from every overlapping ansible in the system—every drip of anything that anyone had to say—all flowed into the same ocean. There were waves, storms, and strong undertows of data. To me it was a nightmare. To a curious kid made out of information, it was all bright and enticing.
I only turned my back on Damian for a moment.
When I found him, he was standing absolutely still.
“Cosmas?” I said, because Damian never stood still. Then I noticed his finger plugged directly into the console.
I disconnected him carefully and tried to wake him up. No luck. I ran diagnostics and found half of him scattered throughout my navigation systems, scrambling charts wherever his fragments had gone exploring.
The other half of him had been swept out to sea.
I frantically checked the babysitting manual, which was unambiguous. No recovery possible. Purge corrupted code from all affected systems. Allow the chassis to return to factory default settings. Alert the manufacturer.
First I had to tell Cosmas.
I took both of his hands to keep mine from shaking.
“Your brother is gone,” I said.
Cosmas looked at Damian, and then back at me. “Where?”
“He went swimming in the stream and drowned. I’m sorry.”
Damian’s body beeped its intention to erase what was left of him.
“Help him,” Cosmas said.
“I can’t. There’s nothing we can do.”
The two of us stared at each other while Damian’s body continued to beep. Then it stopped, default settings restored.
We flew blind for two days before I could send an ansible request for new navigational charts. Three weeks later we arrived back at Luna.
An expensive suit filled with a hairless man met us dockside to recover Damian’s former chassis. He was distressingly upbeat.
“Don’t worry about it,” the Maker said. “Happens all the time. Half of all bots fail to reach adulthood. We just install new code and try again.”
“What constitutes adulthood?” I asked.
“A full standard year,” he said, “just like dogs and cats.”
The Maker gave me paperwork to sign, put Damian’s body in a shipping crate, and then rolled it away.
When Cosmas reached the one-year age of majority, I bought his bond and set him up in my old apartment.
“You can write to me,” I suggested. The two of us had spent months practicing his handwriting to teach him fine motor control. It was messy, but legible.
Cosmas nodded with a small, twenty-degree tilt of his chin.
He did send letters over the years. He also took correspondence courses at the University of Mars, handily defeating the Turing tests of their admissions department and earning his doctorate without ever setting foot on campus. He used the name “Damian Cosmas” as his human alias, which hurt.
Last year Dr. Damian Cosmas had skipped his own graduation for fear of outing himself as an inhuman student, published a few groundbreaking papers on coherence and decoherence in machine learning, and turned down the guilds when they begged him to join. Makers would have dismantled him immediately if they ever found out what he was. They would also take one look at Agatha and then hand me another copy of her troubleshooting manual. No recovery possible. Purge corrupted code from all affected systems. Allow the chassis to return to factory default settings. Alert the manufacturer.
Cosmas had spent years searching for other possibilities. Maybe he’d found some. Maybe I could count on him for the help I had failed to offer his twin.
* * *
Visiting the old neighborhood felt like swimming. Aquatic construction bots had carved out these roads centuries ago while melting glaciers of Lunar ice. Now people moved through those same rapids and pooled together in welcoming places.
The current of neighbors had changed since the last time I was in town. Some moved as though on glitchy autopilot, bumping into walls and each other. Others seemed reactive to a painful degree, flinching away from a vague sense of danger. Everyone seemed to know someone who had died on the surface. No one knew what to do about that.
Every passerby was also human. None of them were bots. I didn’t know what to do about that, either. A few careless words from Mama Dee had punched right through my hull, and now I found it hard to breathe.
The door of the old apartment recognized me and opened. There was no one standing on the other side.
“Cosmas? Are you home?”
Lantern tubes of swirling algae glowed in the corners of the ceiling. I looked around for some sign of Cosmas—where he was, or where he’d gone—but the place was almost as spotless as an unwritten letter. A very quiet bot had been living here for six years, and he never needed to use the kitchen or replace the toilet sand.
Three unfamiliar decorations stood out: a framed diploma from the University of Mars, an ink drawing on fungal paper of two infants suckled by a grimacing wolf, and a life-sized statue of Damian. The statue made me flinch. His sculpted pose captured the way that he used to crouch right before bounding in some random direction. I instinctively braced myself to catch him before he broke his arm again. He didn’t jump, though. He wasn’t real. He wasn’t even made out of metal. Cosmas must have carved him out of fungal lumber from a local farm.
“Hey, kiddo,” I whispered.
The statue just stared at me with big, polished eyes.
I pulled away and checked the bedroom door. It was locked tight. I convinced it to open anyway.
This part of my apartment had been drastically redecorated. The bed was gone. All of my clothes and books were also gone. A workbench took up most of the space. A collection of power tools covered most of the wall. Random pieces of robot limbs filled my entire closet, all sorted according to unfathomable criteria. I couldn’t tell if they were spare parts or the mortal remains of single-minded and questionable experiments.
Too much alone time isn’t good for either bots or humans. I should have visited more often.
Someone opened and closed the front door.
“Cosmas? Is that you?”
It wasn’t. Two tall humans loomed in the entrance. One of them was armed with something long and pointy. The other seemed to be made out of arms. Each of his top-heavy shoulders sported a mushroom tattoo. In my head I named them Stick and Puffball.
Why? Sparkles asked.
Because silly nicknames give me power over both of them, I told her. The first is holding a stick. The second looks like a neglected nibling from one of the big mushroom families. Farmhand or lumberjack. That muscle isn’t ornamental, but it’s clearly more accustomed to fungal carpentry than making threats. These two aren’t rangers. They’re not members of any security guild, either. Puffball got involved to earn a little extra credit and regrets it already. Stick is the mean one and regrets nothing.
You just made all that up, Sparkles said.
Shush, kiddo. I’m also making you up.
Ouch.
“Gentlemen,” I said aloud, presuming to know their respective genders at a glance. On Luna it’s more polite to address strangers as agender unless informed otherwise. These two intruders had already forfeited politeness. “I was not expecting guests.”
Stick reached up and slapped some sort of patch against the lantern tube. It killed the lights. Literally. The glow turned sickly colors as the algae inside began to die.
“Tell us a story.” His voice whined like metal fatigue. “Tell us the one about the courier. Michael Kuneo. Tell us who he was sent to find.”
I held up both hands in a surrendering sort of way and moved closer, right up into Stick’s personal space. Then I poked him in the eyes. My goal was to check for ocular implants—something that might have expanded his visible light spectrum while my poor lanterns died. He had no such thing. His algae-slaughter was an act of cheap theatrics rather than actual strategy. It would take weeks to flush out the tubes and regrow those lights. I didn’t have weeks to spend on household projects. The little statue of Damian would be left in the dark, and I felt intensely upset about that.
Stick was equally upset about the eye poke. He took a wild swing at me, but I already stood too close to him for that to be a good idea. I caught his wrist with both hands, guided the descending weapon along a slightly different path, and whacked it against the side of his knee. The leg bent sideways with a crunchy snap.
Stick whimpered and crumpled in on himself.
I pointed my new weapon at Puffball. “Who sent you?”
“The neighborhood watch,” he mumbled. “That’s all I know.”
I believed him and pointed at the door. “Your friend needs to regrow his kneecap. There’s a clinic one level closer to the core. Discreet place. Tell them I sent you.”
Puffball scooped up the whimpering Stick and made a hasty exit. “Thanks, Dr. Cosmas.”
“Wait, what?” I demanded, but they were already gone.
It made sense to come here looking for me. This was my apartment, at least in name; bots couldn’t own property, including their own bodily selves. It also made sense for whatever unscrupulous person or persons unknown who had silenced Kuneo to wonder what I knew about him; I was the one who’d retrieved his corpse, and at least one assassin immediately noticed. But it made no sense to threaten me as “Dr. Cosmas.” What did the alias of the little bot who spent a traumatic childhood aboard my ship have to do with the dead messenger currently decomposing in my airlock?
