The database I scrolled through was truly massive. Parsing it in real-ti was proving to be even more ti-consuming than I assud it would be when I ca up with this plan. The unfortunate side of the damper’s ti dilation was that it required activating the schism in my neurology; there was no way to have one effect without the other.
I could have all the ti in the world to read through it, but my divided self couldn’t actually do anything useful with it. If Oga studied what she had organized, I would end up with a programd script that was as incomprehensible as the raw data itself and missed the point by removing all the nuances that we needed it for in the first place. Likewise, Alpha would probably miss the entire point of the exercise and beco endlessly distracted with pointless tangents on every mildly interesting entry.
And so it fell to , the reasonable middle ground between their two polarized competencies, to read it and take my own notes without the advantage of thinking a thousand tis faster than the human mind normally did. And for the most part, it was boring.
Aisling had managed to get us landing credentials after about a half hour spent in a wide orbit around the colony’s airspace, and the joyous distraction of flight had been taken from , so I was left to concentrate on my new task in full. It was just so very dull.
There were thousands of entries, most of which were inconsequential commands given to the Demitrius as part of normal operations. What was most interesting was the occasional punctuation of what was almost conversation with the core. Collins certainly didn’t treat her as an equal, but she definitely anthropomorphized her at so level. After noticing the pattern, I added to my notes that it probably suggested a strong sense of empathy in the captain if she was emotionally bonding with the core. Doc agreed with on that.
I figured that I would only need to read part of it to get a picture of what I was looking for, but most of the reading was wading through more routine functions that didn’t betray any useful psychological clues. Neither Isabelle nor Oga seed to realize which of these entries were inconsequential, either, so they were given the sa presence in the docunt. I supposed it was better than them arbitrarily deciding sothing useful wasn’t important, but it made my job a slog.
Isabelle also rarely noted the captain’s mood during these interactions, unless she was outright told how she was feeling or it was so obvious that even a core could pick up on it. So things I thought were important triggers may have just been dictated by a bad day or a particularly elating breakthrough. I’d just have to make so of my own assumptions and try to find consistent patterns rather than extrapolating from single data points.
I needed a break.
With most of the crew out and about in the colony running errands, gathering supplies, and looking for information, I had few ways to distract myself. Ray couldn’t be seen in public, so she was relaxing in her quarters at the mont, but for so reason, I felt especially apprehensive about talking to her today. Doc was still performing maintenance on Isabelle, so I only wanted to interrupt him if I really needed his opinion on sothing important related to my work. That left Collins herself, who I wasn’t going to start a conversation with over the intercom without a really good explanation, and Lily.
I supposed it had been so ti since I just hung out with Lily for a while. Today was as good a day as ever. I watched her sitting in her wheelchair at my heart, doodling idly with her fingertip on the tablet in her lap. She was just a few ters away physically, but we may as well have been on different worlds. Setting my work aside for a mont, I sent an access request directly to Lily.
Our ssaging service was the only thing that Lily ever used her implant for. She told that anything more than that was too strenuous. ntally painful. I couldn’t fathom why, but given she’d been temporarily driven insane by a large enough machine network before, I believed her.
But I was glad she was still able to communicate psychically with . It felt like a private language between sisters. I could have effortlessly tapped the implant myself and just sent her a ssage without checking with her first, but I’d always been careful not to surprise her with the tech ever since her brief, harrowing experience as a ship core. She looked toward the core module as she received it, then nodded slowly, a timid psychic confirmation signalling back as she opened herself to .
‘Hey sis. How you doing today?’ I opened.
‘Pretty good. Be careful taking the stairs tomorrow.’
‘Do I fall down and crack my skull open?’ I asked, wondering if this was so warning of a terrible future or sothing less consequential. Her expression told the latter.
‘Nah, you’re not in danger. It’s way stupider than that, trust . Not all my visions are portents of doom, you know?’ She gave a small smile and rolled her eyes before her gaze returning to her drawing. She had told before that she often needed to remain vague when describing her precognition, because telling others too much would cause the future to change in unexpected ways. ‘Are you bored? I can’t imagine being in there and not having anything to do. I’m probably the only other person in existence who can tell what it’s like to dive, and I know having nothing to do doesn’t describe it.’
‘Oh, I have plenty of work. I’m just slacking off.’ I stuck my tongue out playfully, knowing she couldn’t see . ‘I’m just trying to make sense of this file Oga made.’
‘Ah, my psychic starship sister who is sotis my two sisters for a few seconds at a ti. You ever get tired of being so weird?’ She teased. My penchant for banter was rubbing off on her. I tapped her tablet to take a look at what she was drawing, and she startled slightly. ‘ryll, are you hacking my terminal?’ She grinned.
I was taken aback at that. How did she know? I had learned a long ti ago to be very careful about how I broke into electronics to make sure there was no associated logging or interface stutter. Unless...
‘Wait wait wait, are you networking right now?!’ I excitedly bounced from side to side in the void. I overlooked her drawing of so sort of circuit diagram I didn’t recognize; I had sothing more important to focus on now.
‘It’s not easy.’ She admitted, a look of uneasy concentration on her face as she focused in on sothing digitally. ‘But yeah. It’s only one device, so it doesn’t hurt that bad as long as I don’t tax it too much. I’m trying to get better at it. Physical therapy for my body... digital therapy for my brain, I guess?’
‘That’s aweso! I thought after that whole disaster, you’d never want to connect to another machine besides ever again.’
She let out a sigh. ‘I don’t know. I guess I just feel like I should be using it. Maybe you’re just kind of inspiring. It’s so cool what you can do with a computer just by looking at it. Not even that, just... being near it! I’m not going to throw myself into a core module again, but I can at least learn to use machines I’m not grafted to like you do, right? Even if it doesn’t co as naturally for whatever reason.’
I gave a sad smile, nodding to myself. She wouldn’t be able to use another core module again, anyway. She was already grafted to that experintal fighter ship, after all, and it was gone. Lost to wild space. But she wasn’t wrong; she could still interface less intimately with smaller systems.
I had worried in the first few weeks after we’d gotten to Io that she would feel a sense of loss and longing for her shell. After all, I felt like Theseus was a fundantal part of myself, and I would be devastated if I knew I’d never be able to feel it again. But I suppose her experience had been traumatizing enough that she didn’t feel that sa intrinsic connection with her machine self anymore.
‘You should have told , I can help you out with this stuff, you know? You want to give you so of my simpler scripts? If I tap your implant directly, I could probably help you organize things better, too.’ I offered. My work on Collins’ psychological profile was all but forgotten for now. My sister was embracing her implant! That was way more important!
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She shook her head, but gave a quiet chuckle at my excitent. ‘I think it’s a little understandable that I take this slow, isn’t it?’ She looked up at the sensor array. ‘You’re way better at this than , and what you think is simple is going to be way over my head, so I’d like a chance to make sense of things on my own terms for now, alright?’
‘Alright, fine fine. So what have you figured out how to do so far?’ I asked. If she wasn’t going to accept my help, I at least wanted to know how far along she’d gotten on her own.
‘Well, I can connect to it. Everything gets way more confusing after that. I’m just trying to make sense of how the different kinds of data relate to the interface I can see here. I’m basically just isolating a bunch of variables that react to what I do. I know I can control it, I just need to figure out how.’ She drew a careful line in the diagram she was making, and I could feel her actively querying dozens of nurical variables related to the movents of her finger against the screen and the marks left by it.
I smiled to myself. ‘I’m glad you’re getting into this, even if you’re not having the sa experience I do.’ I was honestly proud of her for stepping out of her comfort zone and trying to make use of her implant after what she’d been through. Six months ago, she was so fragile, scared, and cautious, and here she was advocating for herself and learning a valuable new skill she was in a unique position to take advantage of. She’d gotten stronger, despite being in such a vulnerable position. Probably because she didn’t have to spend all her ti being justifiably scared anymore.
It was puzzling, though. Things like this were intuitive for . I had already unconsciously organized all the data she was painstakingly pulling apart piece by piece to see how it worked, and if I wanted to, I could subvert the entire touch interface or the software of the drawing program with a thought. It wouldn’t be difficult, and I barely had to think about it. I could have chalked it up to my false life’s experience as an IT professional, but the logical leap from what I was looking at to the function I understood wasn’t computer science. It was just intuition.
So that begged the question: What was the difference between Lily and I that gave that instinct?
I shook my head. I didn’t have enough information to definitively make any conclusions. Lily and I were the only sapient biological computers in existence. For all I knew, the ease that I could use the machines I connected to was the norm, and there was sothing unique about Lily’s brain that made it challenging for her. There was that whole thing about her being unable to interact with direct neural simulations since she woke up, so maybe this was an extension of that inability.
But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that there might be sothing important here. ‘Hey Lily.’ I started, ‘I think there’s a huge difference between how we see the digital world. I’m not sure which of us is having the abnormal experience here. Because I took one look at all that data you’re looking at, and I already knew how to subvert the entire thing. I didn’t need to study it or even see what data changed with input. I didn’t even think twice about it.’
‘Well yeah, you’ve been doing this constantly for like, a year now.’ Lily rolled her eyes, ‘And your brain isn’t rejecting everything like mine is. Of course it’s easier for you.’
‘Lily, I’ve never examined this program before. I’ve never interfaced with any drawing program before.’
Her eyebrows rose as she received that ssage. ‘What are you trying to suggest?’
‘Nothing. I’m kinda flailing around in the dark here, hoping I stumble over an answer.’ I admitted, not sure if this was getting us anywhere at all. But I did know one thing for sure, ‘I know things that I shouldn’t know, though. That’s got to an sothing.’
She set the tablet down in her lap and looked to be in thought for a mont. ‘Do you think it’s your talent?’
I actually let out a silent laugh into the lubricant. ‘Being good with computers isn’t a psychic superpower, Lily. Any human can do that. I just have a more intimate way of interacting with them is all. The sa way you do.’
‘Yeah, but...’ She shook her head, ‘ryll, if what you do is sothing a core can normally do, don’t you think soone would have... y’know, weaponized it by now?’
I blinked a few tis, furrowing my brow as I considered that. I needed a mont to consider that thought. It didn’t take long to answer the question: Of course they would have. Machine cores were so ubiquitous in any large machine structure, especially starships, that the kind of intrusive acts I pulled off with little effort would have already been utilized by soone. If this power was so accessible, then it would be well known, and there would be an entire security industry in place to protect against it already. At the very least, that ant that what I could do with computer technology was, at the very least, for so reason, a product of sapience in a biocomputer.
And at most, it was sothing wholly unique to . But that made no sense to . Even as terrifyingly incomprehensible as the psychic talents garnered by Arthausen Units were, it made no sense to that one of those talents would just make supernaturally good at a particular narrow skillset. It felt like it was rooted too much in reality while the others had bizarre, reality-breaking superpowers like psychokinesis and precognition. It was too inconsistent. And kind of la.
‘Okay, let’s assu for the sake of argunt that my talent is... I don’t know, natural hyper-competency with technology.’ I threw my arms out to my sides in the void at the absurdity of that statent alone. ‘How does sothing like that get by Foundation? Did they never give like... aptitude tests?’
‘That was sothing they did with all of us.’ Lily shook her head and closed her eyes. She was polite enough to wait for as I gathered my thoughts, so I took a mont to do a periter sweep while she thought, taking stock of the other mbers of the crew and ensuring our hangar didn’t have any curious intruders. ‘Because they didn’t give you a neural implant.’
I turned my attention back inward to see Lily with her eyes still wide, as if she’d just had the most terrifying revelation. She wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t had any cybernetics at all until Doc gave the hand--down implants from Theseus’s last core. Waking up and feeling confused and afraid in the void, wondering what had been thrust into my brain, was my first real intact mory. I supposed soone might consider the simulation equipnt that Foundation had used to awaken could be considered as such, but it wasn’t made to be a permanent part of my body. ‘I guess they didn’t. So what, I have a stupid instinctual superpower that’s unlocked by giving a specific piece of electronic equipnt?’
Lily bit her lip as she tried to put the right words together, but I could tell by her expression that she had an idea. ‘No,’ she shook her head and made a small, clever smile, like she’d just outsmarted soone. ‘No, no, no... What if... you didn’t need the implant?’
I balked at that, almost laughing. Now she sounded silly. ‘The hell’s that supposed to an?’
A look of frustration crossed her face as she mumbled to herself, trying to work sothing out in her head. Then she went still. Very still. Her expression was slack and her eyes glazed over, staring past everything in front of her. Ah. She was having a vision. Of course, it happened in the middle of a conversation. I sighed quietly to myself and prepared for a wait.
I waited patiently for her to return to reality. I wanted to hear what she had to say, and she was probably seeing a potential future about what we’re having for dinner or sothing. The gift of prophecy evidently rarely offered highly consequential information unless she received it at a critical ‘crossroads mont’, as she called it, which was why her earlier warning didn’t irk that much.
Lily took in a sharp breath and began blinking rapidly, her eyes dried out by her involuntary staring. She let out a shuddering breath and her face took on a sickly pallor as her eyes darted across the room in confusion and fear. She muttered sothing to herself, uncertainty in her muddled words.
‘Lily?’ I tried cautiously, and her breathing sped up for a mont before she wrangled her emotions. She swallowed, and her body slowly relaxed back into her chair.
She went to open her mouth to speak out loud, then thought better of it and ssaged across our network. ‘Forget about it. It was just a stupid theory.’
Oh. That sounded... ominous sohow. I watched her on my sensors, and she still looked shaken. ‘Lily... did you see sothing important?’
She hesitated, swallowing hard before she sent, ‘I can’t say.’ Then she gave a sad sigh.
I nodded slowly. Sothing she’d seen had shaken her to her core. Whatever force dictated what she saw and how the world responded to her forbidden knowledge forbade her from sharing it, or else she would alter the flow of cause and effect. ‘Are you alright?’
She gave the faintest shake of her head and then started nodding slightly before suddenly severing her connection to our private network and speaking out loud in a faint, shaking voice, “I-I... need to think for a little while.”
I nodded slowly, choosing not to tap her implant and establish our connection again. I went to the intercom instead. “Hey... I understand. If you can’t tell , you can’t tell . If you have to keep in the dark to keep soone safe, I won’t bla you.”
She let out the faintest sob and looked down, trying to avoid my sensor array. “Thank you,” she spoke faintly. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” I smiled.
But I couldn’t shake the sense of disappointnt I felt that our conversation had been cut short. Her vision was important, but she couldn’t discuss it with . That ant it was about . And based on the timing...
Had she been on the right track?
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