Theseus Anger, Bargaining

I watched from my prison as she operated with terrifying efficiency, my ntal construct of myself busily running calculations and sending signals to ever-so-slightly manipulate the orientation of Theseus while repositioning its cannons. In a matter of seconds that I knew were truly only milliseconds, she had already carefully planned exactly where our shots would land and calculated the reaction to the debris it would create.

I could barely understand every little action she was performing within the system. All I could feel was the despair of watching from the outside as she prepared to kill my sister with brutal certainty.

In a flash, it was finished. The next several seconds of action were planned out with reasonable contingencies for the most likely outcos. I hated how simple it was. How easy it was going to be to remove her from this life. My beloved sister who I had only just begun to recall my love for was going to be annihilated, and it was my fault for not coming up with a way to save her.

My counterpart’s taphysical hand hovered over the command that would unleash her calculated fury and end this assault. But she stopped.

The clock ticked forward at its impossibly slow pace, but she took no action. Then she lowered her hand and closed her eyes. “There is ti.” She declared, then turned and looked directly at with that face of concentrated indifference.

I knew this wasn’t real. I knew this was all an abstraction of my cybernetically altered mind layered onto my imagination, but in that mont, it didn’t matter. There were two of us floating in the depths of that digital ocean, and she towered far over . She had all the control. Did she an to gloat? Did she wish to highlight the palpable fear for her that consud ?

I hadn’t so much spoken in this state before as I scread in agony over my inability to do anything or even think clearly. But now, as the center of her attention, that must have offered enough clarity to do more than wail in despair.

“What are you doing?” I asked dully, my heart already broken by what had to be done. I had no fight left in to flail and demand freedom this ti. I may as well fade away in despair now. “Just get it over with.”

“The optimal ti to fire will be in approximately 2.87 seconds,” she droned, no hesitation or sorrow in her voice, only cold certainty. “Sothing else must be addressed in the interim.”

I sniffled, feeling like tears had co to my eyes. “If you want to delete , do it before I have to kill Lily,” I grumbled. “I don’t even care anymore. I deserve it.”

She stared at with those cold, calculating eyes. I wondered if I ever physically looked like that when I was fully myself. Then she rigidly shook her head. “What are we?”

The question caught off guard. It wasn’t related to the problem at hand at all, was it? Why would she focus on that now? I regretted not waiting a little longer to activate the damper, so that there was less ti to mull things over like this. I felt myself grow mad at the audacity of the question, though. “You are nothing!” I spat. “You’re just a computer. You’re... you’re an unfeeling copy of that wants out of the way so you can... operate Theseus efficiently! That’s all! You don’t even care what you’re about to do!”

She stared at and slowly nodded at sothing. “What is eighteen plus twenty-four?”

What? I grit my teeth and glared at her, wondering what the hell that was supposed to an. “Is this so kind of test?”

“Yes. What is the sum of eighteen and twenty-four? Calculate it,” she demanded.

I wasn’t certain what she could possibly be getting at, but I humored her. “It’s...” I opened my mouth to continue, but what should have been a simple calculation a child could do was slipping through my thoughts like sand between my fingers. Try as I could, I couldn’t co up with the answer. “I... don’t know?” I asked.

Wait. What? What was happening to ?

She nodded carefully. “I see. I had believed the opposite in our earlier encounters. That you were a construct created by the damper. An isolated structure holding my invasive thoughts at bay so that I could work clearly. But it appears we were both mistaken.”

“What does that have to do with math?!” I shouted.

“I do not know if you will be capable of comprehending this.” She said carefully, clearly pondering sothing. “For lack of a better way to put it... I cannot feel. You cannot think. You must be suppressed for us to operate efficiently, and I cannot experience independent continuity outside of this state.”

“What the hell does that an?!” I shouted angrily, my frustration mounting.

“That neither of us is a construct. It ans that we are two halves of a whole. I am the mind, you are the soul. You are not simply a function holding part of . We are collectively ryll, sundered. I think that perhaps we already understood that before we used it this ti, after contemplating Isabelle’s nature, but were not capable of consciously parsing it.”

I felt... confused. I was ryll. But she was also ryll? But I felt like I’d just been shoved to the back of my head, in whole, when the damper activated. My head felt like mush while I tried to make sense of it. She was right. I couldn’t think clearly. I could barely reason what this ant. “What does that an?!” I eventually scread.

She held her hand out in front of her as if requesting to stop. “Calm. I cannot empathize. You are made of emotion. You are illogical. Stop trying to make sense of this the way I can. Co to a conclusion in the way that you must.”

Reason without logic. Conclusion without thought. Focus on what I can control. I swallowed my fear and anxiety. Those weren’t helping. I closed my eyes and tried to think about this revelation. How did it make feel? Confused? Confusion didn’t help without logic to untangle it. If she was right, I couldn’t understand it. Not like that. Was this so kind of insanity? No, that concern over an errant thought wasn’t helping. I was already trying to control so many wild emotional tangents, though. I shook my head in frustration.

“Deep breaths. That action precedes calm.” She reminded .

Deep breaths... Part of was aware that this wasn’t really breathing because this whole conversation was a ntal construct, but the idea of taking a deep breath did help ease the turmoil. “Why are you helping ?” I asked, almost in tears.

“Now that I understand what you are, why would I not help myself?” She asked.

“I thought you wanted gone. You tried to delete . I was so scared.” I took in another deep breath. “What changed?”

“We learned.” She said simply. “Though you are not conducive to the operation of Theseus, it may be of vital importance not to ignore you entirely. You are, after all, the core of our existence outside of this space. As such, it would be unwise to hurt you.”

“So you’re being nice to because you have to?” I asked.

“... Is that a comforting thought?”

“Not at all...” I whimpered. “Why would you think that’s comforting?”

“I don’t.”

I paused for a mont. The reality that she didn’t feel at all made feel uncertain and numb. “Do you intend to keep here?”

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

“The end of our last eting was disastrous. The damage to our brain and our systems could perhaps have been mitigated if I had ended the damper’s function myself; sothing that I am fully capable of. Keeping the damper active beyond necessity was an error bred by ignorance. I will not make the mistake of assuming my role is indefinite this ti.” She turned back away from . “But for the purposes of combating this enemy, yes. I will be holding you until the threat has been neutralized. You are currently a hindrance to our ability to protect ourselves and our crew.”

“Oh.” I groaned quietly, descending into despaired silence while my counterpart made minor adjustnts to her plan for the ager changes that had happened in the fraction of a second that had passed since she had constructed the end of the battle. “If you can’t feel anything, why comfort ?”

“The intent was not to comfort, it was to inform. I reasoned that this would make you more cooperative and less distracting.” She glanced back at for a mont. “I expect you to inform if my decisions may have long-term emotional consequences on our well-being. Calmly.”

I nodded slowly. Did that an she was allowing so say in our decisions? Did that an I wasn’t going to be as completely powerless as I’d felt so far? I suddenly felt that, even if I was still caged, I was standing beside this other , not beneath her. Not just a tiny trapped speck beholding a god. She was in control, but did she really respect my input?

“Long-term emotional consequences...” I mumbled, suddenly returning to the actual matter at hand. “I’m... going to feel devastated. I already feel so guilty about what’s happening to Lily. I love her so much and now we have to kill her. It’s not fair.”

“I suppose that it isn’t,” my counterpart agreed. “The circumstances that led us here were far outside of our control.

“Is there anything we can do? Anything at all?” I stared down into the depths of the digital ocean surrounding us. “Was there anything we could have done?”

My logical side paused her work. “Perhaps. Lily’s problems are far outside of my realm of understanding, but perhaps a different approach in our previous interactions could have prevented her from attacking us.”

“Don’t say that,” I whined. “This really is all my fault...”

“She is the one who decided to attack us. It is not our fault at all.”

“But we drove her to this! If-If I hadn’t told her the truth, then-”

“Then she would have returned to Foundation and beco an even greater threat.” She turned back toward , sounding like she was becoming impatient.

“This isn’t about her being a threat!” I couldn’t believe that’s what she was focused on here; that a part of could be so selfish. “Lily is in pain! A lot of kinds of pain! And yeah, maybe she’d be in a different kind of pain where they were sending her, I don’t know! But because of what we said, she’s suffering the way she is right now! And-and she loves us so much that she wants to end our pain too.”

“She is trying to kill us,” she said flatly.

“Because she doesn’t have a choice! You rember it, right? That dream. We were... we felt awful, constantly. And there were no choices left to make. We couldn’t even think what we did through, we just... did things.” I sniffled, holding myself tight. “Awful things...”

“It makes no difference.” She declared. “Now, we only have one course of action. We must protect ourselves. Lily will die no matter what action we take. The only question at hand is if we go with her.”

“Can’t you do anything though?! Anything at all! Please! You need to stop her, I get that! But can’t you... I don’t know! I can’t think clearly! I have no ideas! I just know that if we kill her here, then we’ll... we’ll never be able to forgive ourselves. We’ll never stop feeling guilty. We’ll be in our own kind of pain again. And we’ll never be able to escape it.”

My counterpart remained silent for what felt like a long ti, then glanced back to the interface she’d been utilizing and began her optimization work once more, building further contingencies depending on the arc of the ship’s debris. “1.49 seconds until optimal firing range.” She muttered. “We will be alive. That is the optimal outco.”

“Is it?” I sniffled. “I already feel like I would rather die.”

The other stopped in her tracks, still staring into the image she’d constructed of projected paths and firing angles. “Do you rember what Aisling told us once? You can’t shoot to wound.”

My eyes went wide. I hadn’t been able to form the idea myself, but as soon as she put it in the air between us, it felt obvious. “But you can! You can aim as carefully as you need to! You still have so much ti! You can disable her ship! We can still save her!”

She gave a frustrated grunt, looking down at herself. “No. We cannot. That was her entire point. That we can only shoot to kill.” She let out a quiet groan. “The fact that I can do it is immaterial. It would cascade into an unacceptable risk of failure. I can all but guarantee the course of the wreckage in the aftermath of that ship’s destruction. A pile of tal slag is simple to predict. A half-functional starship is not. There is an unacceptable probability that she would still take us with her.”

“How unacceptable?” I asked.

“I refuse to explain that. You will not have an objective understanding of it. It does not matter what I say, your emotions will drive you to take any risk. I can prove it. What would you consider an acceptable chance that I wound her and we die anyway?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter? It’s Lily’s life.” I tried to wrack my brain for a few monts, but there was no way for to pull together any kind of reasoning for how I felt, so I just threw out a high number. “Eighty! I’d accept an eighty percent chance we don’t make it!”

“And then we would almost certainly die. You probably cannot even understand why this should clearly not be your decision to make.

Our shared taphysical space went silent for so ti as we watched the milliseconds tick by. I started to cry. I knew there must be so logical way I could sway the part of that was in control now. The idea had now been planted into , so maybe I could pull it off now if I could shut down the damper. Except, I wasn’t capable of that, and without computational ti, there was no way I’d be able to mount the precision I’d need to ensure I didn’t just kill her by accident. I wouldn’t even be able to evade in ti if I were in full control now.

Lily was going to die, and there was nothing I could do.

“Seventeen percent.” She broke the silence.

“Huh?” I sobbed.

“If I were to make a disabling shot, I estimate approximately a one in six chance of collision. Seventeen percent,” she said with resignation.

“That sounds reasonable to !” I shouted.

“Then you do not understand probability. If we were to take every one in six chance over a safe choice of certainty, then we would be dead within our first six choices on average. A decision with half as much risk would still be too much of a chance.”

“But this isn’t every decision! This is Lily!” I cried out desperately. “She saved us. She loved us. She did everything she could to get us through a nightmare! She took her chance on us! What do you think the odds were for her?!”

“Her precognition allows her to mitigate risks. We do not have the gift of foresight like she does.”

“But she doesn’t see everything! She definitely didn’t see this!” I gestured toward the complex diagram she’d been planning so far. “She didn’t see the pain she’s in. I know she didn’t see herself being driven this far. I know she wouldn’t choose to do this to us. To herself!”

“Enough!” My counterpart barked sharply. I suddenly felt small again. Like the contempt she’d held for had just co rushing back. Like I was once again small and insignificant and unheard. Like I could be stomped out of existence on a whim. “I have erred in allowing your input. Perhaps on future matters, but not on this one. This one was already decided before we were split apart. On this, we have no choice. There is only one thing we can do. Damn the emotional consequences.”

We returned to uncomfortable silence as ti drew nearer. I wasn’t good at calculating exact timings like she was, but I watched the system clock tick by as we ca nearer to the designated optimal firing ti.

“I guess she was right after all.” I whispered to myself.

“Yes, that we cannot shoot to wound.” My logical side nodded.

I shook my head. “Not her.” I let out a sigh and closed my eyes. I already knew that this would haunt for the rest of my life. The ti I wouldn’t even take a chance for soone I dearly loved and would miss. “I’m really just not good enough.”

I heard the slightest hitch in my counterpart’s movents and looked up. I couldn’t see her face from behind her, but she looked like she was frozen in place. Slowly, her hand dropped to her side, and we returned to true still silence together. A question hung in the air, and neither of us seed to want to answer it.

And then finally, we hit roughly half a second until the mont of truth, and my other half let out a loud sigh before erupting into a flurry of new motion, setting aside her calculations and beginning anew.

“What are you doing?” I asked, hopefully. She didn’t answer, rely focused on creating so complex script that I couldn’t make any sense of. Finally, after what felt like minutes of tense activity, she ca to another sudden halt.

“You are not ryll in whole. And neither am I. But perhaps if we learn to work together like this, we can be sothing more. I must trust in compromise.” She turned to look at again, once more as equals. “So let us roll the dice.” She reached back and launched the newly minted script. I smiled at her and felt a wave of relief as we both blurred together once more.

The damper shut off, and we returned to normal ti and whole self, my tense internal negotiation punctuated by the sound of a single shot of precise cannon fire registering outside my shell.