Providence

by Max Barry

  “Explain that better,” Beanfield said, “for those of us in the Humanities.”

  “It’s possible that salamanders generate pheromones during their attack to record their actions. Where they went. How long they survived. If other salamanders can recover those, they could reconstruct a pretty good battle record.”

  “So they learn to anticipate the pulse?”

  “Exactly. Salamanders that turned at the right time would record a longer survival time.”

  “Huh,” Beanfield said. “You’re a real nerd, Gilly.”

  “It’s just a theory,” he said modestly. He was sure he was right.

  “Ship is getting anxious,” Jackson said.

  “One minute. I want to confirm this.” He began sifting through the data, looking for chemical signatures. Then zeroes flooded his readouts. The ship had pulsed, reducing everything to ash.

  “We’re moving,” Jackson said. “Sorry, Intel. Ship got impatient. Weapons, status? Anders?”

  There was a pause. It had been a while since Anders had chimed in, Gilly realized.

  “Anders is off-comms and dark on ping,” Beanfield said.

  “Pardon me?” Jackson said.

  “I think he left station. A while ago.”

  “Hive reduced to sub-gram particles,” Gilly said, to fill the silence. “Nothing left out there now.”

  “End engagement,” Jackson said, and signed off.

  “Engagement closed,” Gilly said.

  * * *

  —

  An hour later, Beanfield called in over comms to ask if he’d seen Anders. Gilly was in his cabin, working his board. “No,” he said. He’d assumed Anders was being torn a new butthole by Jackson. “Want me to locate him?” In an emergency, he could force a ping from any film, even if Anders was trying to stay dark.

  “Could you maybe just take a wander around the places you guys usually hang, see if he’s there? I don’t want to make it into a big deal.”

  “I’m kind of busy.”

  “With what?”

  “I’m writing up my pheromone theory.”

  “Can that wait?”

  “Well,” he said, trying to think how to say, No, Beanfield, it’s a groundbreaking discovery.

  “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.”

  He took a breath. “I’ll try to look up Anders.”

  “He’s been taking VZ hard,” Beanfield said. “Harder than the rest of us.”

  “I hear you.” He was sure Anders was going to be fine. At this moment, Gilly was far more interested in getting his theory into a document before anyone else came up with it. He could practically feel the AI churning away, crunching data.

  “Thanks, Gilly,” she said. “You’re a champ.”

  He wrote for three hours straight and then began to pull their past engagements and rework them, looking for chemical traces to bolster his theory. They hadn’t been scanning at a micro level at the time, so it was hard to extract the data he wanted, but there was enough to make his case, he thought: that salamanders had been able to communicate even after death via chemical secretion. He bundled up the data into tables, wrapped up his text, and submitted it to the ship.

  His shoulders and neck ached. He crawled into his bunk and fell into a half-dozing state. He dreamed about the ship, except it was bloodthirsty. It was hunting down salamanders not because of programming but because it wanted to. He woke in confusion and for a few moments wasn’t sure which part had been the dream. Then he rolled over and thought of other things and fell back to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  Anders was back on ping the next day, so Gilly made contact and scheduled a game of ninja stars. Then he read over his document. He found plenty of areas to tidy or clarify and when his playdate reminder popped, he snoozed it, and again half an hour later, then dismissed a message from Anders that asked if he was coming. When he finally made his way down to F Deck, he rounded a corner and found Anders urinating against a wall. He stopped.

  Anders turned toward him, putting out a steady stream. His eyebrows rose. “Gilly!”

  “What are you doing?”

  Anders looked at the pool of urine. “Don’t worry. The ship cleans it up.”

  “But you don’t have to piss on the floor.”

  Anders said nothing.

  “Are you okay?” Gilly said.

  Anders began to tuck himself into his pants, being very careful. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

  He was beginning to regret it. “Well, I’m here.” He shifted his weight. “Where have you been going, anyway? You keep dropping off ping.”

  Anders zipped. “Want me to show you?”

  “Sure.”

  “During the next engagement.”

  Gilly squinted. “What?”

  “I found something. But it only works during an engagement.”

  “Are you asking me to leave station during an engagement?”

  “Forget it,” Anders said.

  “I can’t do that and neither can you.”

  “Forget I asked. Can you open small-arms lockers?”

  The arms lockers were located on every second deck, in case they were flung four years backward in time to when salamanders got close enough to see with the naked eye. “No. Jackson has to authorize that.”

  “I mean in practice. You’re Intel. You can cycle the locks, right?”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “Guns, Gilly,” Anders said. “We get a couple of guns. Then it’s the same as ninja stars.”

  “We’re not doing that.”

  “Not big guns. Just the pistols.”

  “Accessing arms lockers without approval? This is court-martial stuff.”

  Anders’s jaw came out. Gilly could see that in Anders’s head, pistols were just the beginning. After pistols, there would be rifles, junior burger guns, or lightning guns. Now he was offended because Gilly wouldn’t even do pistols. “Fuck me,” Anders said. “You’re such a pussy.”

  “I’m leaving,” Gilly said.

  Anders came after him. The corridor was too small for Anders to overtake him, but Gilly could sense him following. “Wait. Gilly. We can play ninja stars.”

  “I don’t want to play anymore.”

  “Something else, then.”

  His film flared. There was another burst valve, this time on K Deck. It was amazing to Gilly that he could deduce an alien species’ chemical-based learning pattern but not diagnose a few exploding pipes. “I have shit to do, Anders.” He reached the ladder hatch and hauled it open. When he began to descend, Anders stared at him balefully.

  “You don’t know anything,” Anders said.

  He ignored this and kept climbing. With luck, Anders wouldn’t follow. Anders was weirdly reluctant to use ladders. When they played ninja stars, nine times out of ten, Anders would stay on the same deck. Gilly reached K Deck and was confronted with billowing steam. Crabs crawled across the floor, heading into the fog. He unsnapped the gloves from his belt. Behind him, Anders’s boots crashed onto the floor, as if he’d slid down the entire length of the ladder like a fireman’s pole.

  “I have to fix this valve,” Gilly said.

  “No you don’t.”

  “Anders? I know you don’t take this seriously, but I do. Let me do my job.” He flipped his film into diagnostics to bring up a visual overlay of water flow.

  “Take off your fucking film.”

  Gilly ignored him, watching fluid dynamics.

  “Take off your film,” Anders said, and was suddenly on top of him, his fingers gouging Gilly’s face. They struggled. Anders ripped the film from him.

  “You’re crazy!” Gilly shouted, backing away. “You’ve gone insane!”

  “Turn around.”

 
; He didn’t want to do that, because what would happen next was Anders would jump him, or clock him with something. But as he stood there panting, fists bunched, he became aware of the silence. He turned. The corridor was empty. No steam. No leak.

  “You don’t need to worry about the valve,” Anders said.

  Gilly stared at the pipes running down the corridor. The crabs could repair things like that quickly. But the metal patching they left behind was an unmistakable dull yellow. What he was looking at were pipes that hadn’t been touched in months.

  “See? We can hang out,” Anders said. “But don’t tell Beanfield, okay? Our secret.”

  “Scheduler?” Gilly said. But of course that was no good; he wasn’t wearing his film. He couldn’t schedule a meeting. He couldn’t do anything. “Beanfield?” he called.

  “Shh,” Anders said. “Be cool, Gilly.”

  “Give me my film,” he said. “Give me my film!”

  * * *

  —

  Beanfield sat across the table from him. Behind her stood Jackson, arms folded. Where Anders was, Gilly didn’t know. In trouble, he guessed. As for himself, he was lost. He was floating in space, with nothing to hold on to.

  “It’s a four-year mission,” Beanfield said. “It’s really important that all of us receive adequate mental stimulation over that period. For our own sanity.”

  He looked at Jackson for her reaction to this piece of ridiculousness. Her expression remained the same.

  “Think of it like a treadmill. Are you actually getting anywhere? No, but it’s exercise. It’s keeping you healthy, improving your strength, your conditioning. Keeping you sharp.”

  There had been a lot of hazing at Camp Zero. Gilly had always felt vulnerable to it, because he tended to take things literally. Pranks had to be explained to him. Even then, he couldn’t understand their motivation. He kept still in case this was one of those times.

  “Speak,” Jackson said.

  “There’s no valve problem?”

  “No,” Beanfield said. “The ship painted that on your film. As a puzzle.”

  “A puzzle?” he said. “Like a crossword?”

  “You’re high-testing for intelligence. We have to keep your mind engaged.”

  He gave a short laugh. He was high-testing for intelligence. He had spent two years on a ship diagnosing engineering problems that didn’t exist. He was a real genius.

  “It’s dangerous to send people into space for four years with nothing to do,” Beanfield said. “Especially a civilian, like yourself, with relatively little mental training. So Service developed these exercises.”

  He felt detached from this conversation. Like he was standing back, watching it. “Who else got puzzles? You?”

  “Well, no,” she said.

  He looked at Jackson.

  “No,” said Beanfield.

  “Anders?” he said hopefully.

  “He used to,” Beanfield said.

  “What happened?”

  “He figured it out.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Gilly said.

  “Don’t interpret this as a failure. Anders is low-testing for compliance. He interacts experimentally with his environment. That’s not better. It’s just different.”

  He put his elbows on the table. His head felt heavy.

  “I know this feels like a betrayal, Gilly. I know it will take time to process.”

  “What about the engagements?”

  “What about them?”

  “Are they real?”

  She looked shocked. “Gilly, this was a mental dexterity exercise. That’s all. And, you might have noticed, Anders is walking proof of why they’re useful.”

  “Engagements are real,” Jackson said. “They’re the most real thing we do.”

  “But we don’t do anything. We don’t even have to be at station, do we? All we do is monitor what the ship is doing. It decides where to go. It can fight without us. It doesn’t even . . .” He trailed off, because the words he was about to speak, he had actually said once before, to Beanfield, without realizing their implication. “It doesn’t even know we’re here.”

  “Let’s not get carried away,” Jackson said. “Shit can break. When it does, you’re here to fix it.”

  He looked at her. Nothing was going to break. The ship could diagnose and repair itself.

  “It’s possible your swarm analysis is useful, too,” Beanfield said. “I mean, it’s all data for the ship. It may help it decide one way or the other.”

  He closed his eyes. He couldn’t take much more of this.

  “Gilly, there’s another really important reason we’re out here,” Beanfield said. “We’re a humanizing media presence.”

  He stared. Then he looked at Jackson, because if that meant what he thought it did, he couldn’t believe she would tolerate it.

  “Service needs human faces out here to sell the war effort. Not drones. Providences are expensive, Gilly. They don’t get built unless people pay for them. We help convince them that their sacrifice is worthwhile, via our feeds and interviews.”

  “What?” he said.

  “War is a lot of moving parts. This is one of them.”

  He wanted this meeting to end. He wanted to lock himself in his cabin and not come out again. He’d thought he was someone, doing something.

  “I’ll give you some time to think this out,” she said. “You want to hear something crazy, though? This could be a good thing. We can be really honest with each other now.” The corner of her lip curled. “And didn’t you always suspect? Even a little?”

  “No,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  But maybe he had. It seemed impossible that he’d missed it. He’d understood the capabilities of the AI. He’d known it could do everything he could, only better. How could he have avoided the logical conclusion—that everything he did was pointless—unless he’d wanted to?

  He hadn’t beaten the ship to the pheromone theory, he saw now. He’d requested that it wait while he investigated. But it had wanted to move on immediately. Because it already knew what was happening, and what needed to be done.

  Maybe they were right not to tell him, because now he was angry. The only thing that had kept him going at Camp Zero had been the idea that eventually he would get out and start to do things that mattered. So what now?

  He stared at the wall of his cabin. He had two more years on this ship. He couldn’t think of how to fill the next fifteen minutes. “Shit,” he said, quietly. Maybe he really would turn out like Anders.

  4

  [Beanfield]

  THE SHIP

  Well,” she said, once Gilly had left. “That was unfortunate.”

  Jackson shrugged fractionally. “He was always going to figure it out.”

  Jackson, of course, had never seen the point of concealing the truth from Gilly. Jackson held the idea that you could tell someone what to do and they would go do it and that was that. This wasn’t even true with soldiers. “You’re probably right.”

  “Service wastes too much time on that garbage,” Jackson said. “Feeds and mind games.”

  “Mmm,” said Talia. And Life Officers, was the next part of that sentence.

  “Gilly’s risking his life out here like the rest of us. He deserves the truth.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  The thing is, Jolene, not everyone on this ship is trying to flee survivor’s guilt. For normal people, being trillions of miles from home is kind of difficult. It’s kind of debilitating. Jackson was married. This was part of her sacrifice: She had waved good-bye to her husband for four years. Talia wasn’t going to say anything, but to be honest she wasn’t a hundred percent sold on how much of a sacrifice that really was. If you pressed her, Talia might guess that J
olene Jackson’s husband was one more person she’d run into space to escape.

  “I see the argument,” she said. “But it’s situational. Some people struggle with this more than others.”

  Jackson squinted at her. “You’re talking about Anders?”

  Of course she was. “His boredom is creating operational problems. Gilly’s now an issue because Anders was too bored to keep his mouth shut.” Jackson leaned back in her seat. Her stupid sidearm gleamed. Sometimes Talia caught herself fantasizing about snatching that thing out of its holster and throwing it down a corridor, just to see Jackson’s expression. She had researched it, because she had nothing better to do, and discovered it fired compressed air. It made a loud noise and disturbed hairstyles, essentially. Jackson never put it down. “I don’t care what he told Gilly. I care about him skipping station. It’s dereliction of duty. And he doesn’t have many duties.”

  She honestly wondered what Jackson did in her downtime. It must be something. How else could she believe that having few duties was a good thing?

  “You say he was getting hydrexalin? How?”

  “Medical. He deliberately engages in games with a high injury risk.”

  “That stops.”

  “The games?”

  “All of it,” Jackson said. “I don’t care what you have to do. He’s absent from station again, I’m having him confined.”

  She felt that would be bad. Locking Anders in his cabin: She did not have a good feeling about that. She would like to try some tactics that didn’t involve massively escalating the situation. “I’ll get him to station.”

  “Make sure you do,” Jackson said.

  * * *

  —

  Anders had a history. Her first day at Camp Zero, after the Service brass with stony eyes and whip-crack voices finished telling them what a glorious honor it was to be standing where they were right now, representing humanity in its hour of greatest need, fighting to defend our brilliant blue bubble against an evil alien aggressor, et cetera, and so forth, she had looked around to check out her competition and Paul Anders had breezed by. She stared after him and a girl beside her said, “Who was that?” and another girl said, “I don’t know, but I think I’m going to like it here,” and they had laughed and bonded while Talia tried to decide whether it would be weird to start laughing, too, and decided yes.