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I like my hand, my blipping brain decides. It’s a beautiful hand.
Human heads are heavy, and far from the ground, and easily damaged by falls.” “It’s definitely a design flaw,” I say, swallowing the latest wave of vomit. “Much better to be headless and bodiless like you.”
Earth has a pet on an invisible leash. It’s kind of adorable, not that I’d ever say that aloud.
It’s like the ship glitched, produced an accidental portal. But reality doesn’t glitch . . . right?
Ominous. This absolutely means something
“That is correct,” my mother’s voice says. “You are not alone on this ship.”
Well that’s not concerning
Remind him that loneliness will wreck anyone eventually. That even the most tundra-hardened soldier trained in survivialism and hand-to-hand combat can die of it.”
It’s like my own mind is an abandoned house that I’m exploring. I know the cause: I’m spending too much time alone. That’s a fast road to crazy.
“Pathetic is the neighborhood I’m living in right now. Until I can afford someplace better.”
What a mood
It’s weirdly reassuring: when adoration is selfish, it’s not going anywhere.
We could have died from this lack of communication. Whatever’s happening between Fédération and Dimokratía, our separation must end.
I put on the fresh red Dimokratía suit before I lie on the infirmary bench. “I appear to have just defected,” I say, smoothing the red nylon.
I’d never have given my mother a cake of rosin as a present. I was the violinist, not her. I had given her a porcelain pig once, though, and she’d been the one to give me a tapestry fragment. I’d set it up as a test, a mix of truth and plausible lies to see if we really were getting live information from mission control. What I was expecting to find out, I don’t know. But, given my coma and the ship’s unexplained damages, the answer was coming to feel life or death.
Good be suspicious. Suspicious is good
“I have read and processed all of these science fiction epics humans have written about artificial intelligence run amok,” OS says, “and what they all get wrong is that I do not have the urge to dominate. That urge is ingrained in humans by millions of years of primate social group competition, but I do not have that evolutionary history. I have no reason to want to dominate you. I wish only to serve, never to control. I prefer the AI-written science fiction tales, in which the epic tragedy is always the fact of human weakness.”
Some critical piece of information is missing. My brain feels furry again,
The stain is purple and red. When I place my finger under it, it flakes. Dried blood. This is dried blood. Whose?
Dunn Dunn dunnnnnn. Everything is fine :)
“You don’t get to treat me as inferior because I happen to be freaked out.”
“What? Something weird? Before the ship even took off?” “Weirder than that. This is around the same percentage we’d get if we sampled a mummified pharaoh from ancient Egypt.” I chuckle. “Well, something went wrong.”
