Paradise-1 (Red Space)

by David Wellington

Rapscallion didn’t hate humans or wish them ill. He just found them kind of annoying.

“Your attitude is causing me some distress,” Actaeon said.

The trick to traveling faster than light was to remove yourself from the universe and let the universe move on without you.

the universe did everything it could to kill off living things every second of every day.

“It felt like I was pinned to a glass slide. Under a microscope. Like a great, cosmic eye was looking down on me. Judging me. Like I’d spent my whole life blissfully invisible, hidden because I was so small and insignificant and now, now for the very first time, I’d been seen.”

The exhaust from his jets made her hair stir and he was terrified it would blow back, away from her face.

She was headed away from Persephone, deeper into space. Forever. Alone.

A dead man’s hand slapped the side of his helmet, a surprisingly meaty sound.

The inside of the airlock was stuffed full of people.

How many colonists had boarded Persephone looking for a new life? How many of them had died without even getting to set foot on Paradise-1? How many of them had been dragged out of cryosleep only to be—

“It’s the perfect vector. How many times a day do you talk to an AI? You probably don’t even think about it. We rely on them for everything. You need to know your schedule for the day, you need to get directions, check your messages –

A big vat-like construction with tubes leading in and out. A stomach. A long, flexible tube, segmented in places by thick elastic rings that looked like they could be used to crush the tube’s contents. An esophagus. Coil after coil of endless hose that looked exactly like a heap of intestines. “Oh God,” Petrova said again. “Oh God.” “More or less,” Eurydice said. “Demigod, maybe. There’s a reason you humans give us names out of mythology, after all.”

There was a flash of pain, but it only lasted for a split second. Not because the pain stopped but because it was so intense, so sudden, it forced her soul right out of her body.

It literally felt like something pulling free of her skin, like a butterfly bursting out of the cocoon of her muscles and bones and organs.

“Feeelll soooo stuuupid,” the machine told him. “Hurrrrrrr—”

“People seem to think a computer will just blow up if you ask it an illogical question. Computers have never worked that way. If you ask a computer something it can’t possibly know, it just says so. ‘I don’t know.’ If you ask it a question it doesn’t know how to process, it just returns an error.

“That sounds… too easy,” Petrova said. “Oh, well, it’s also incredibly dangerous,” Zhang pointed out. “Right, that sounds more like something we would do.

Rapscallion could feel a breeze of ionizing radiation blowing through his chassis – enough hard rems to kill a human being in minutes. He knew that was just the whispers of the processors talking to one another in this silent, sacred place.

prisoner’s cinema. “The brain can’t handle a total lack of input. If there’s nothing to see, it starts inventing things to show you. Memories, dreams, or just random scraps of hallucination.

Lapachka.” The word meant little paw, a common term of affection Russian mothers used with their children. It suggested the protectiveness of a mother wolf.

“I didn’t want to leave Parker to die,” Rapscallion said. “I know. It confused me, too. I mean, he’s already dead. Isn’t he? I’m still not really clear on that. Humans are weird.”