Call of Worlds

by K. D. Lovgren

  “Captain’s meeting,” Cooley said. “To determine the intermediate steps to take regarding Ocean traveler Sif Elfa, currently imprisoned in the quarantine quarters on the aforementioned ship.”

  Kal wanted to glance at Sasha but didn’t. She’d have to stand on her own here.

  “Captain Sarno. You have rank. What would would like to do?”

  Sasha wasn’t looking at anyone. Her eyes were fixed on some midpoint for longer than seemed reasonable. Kal had a qualm she’d lost herself again. Regressed.

  Cooley didn’t rush her. Kal was taking in a breath to speak when Sasha did it for her. “It’s a problem.”

  Cooley nodded. Sasha looked lost. Kal bit her lip.

  Sasha cleared her throat. “Captain Black Bear has the most experience with Sif Elfa after the pods ejected. I have some thoughts on it. I don’t think she can be trusted. I’m not comfortable holding her indefinitely in quarantine. She’s been in isolation for weeks now. I think our best move is to find out how we can eject the Carys from inside Sif. If there’s a way for the Carys to get in, there should be a way to get it out. Noor would be our best bet on that.”

  “You mean some kind of experimentation?” Cooley said. “On a living person?”

  “Noor might be able to run simulations, but essentially, yes.” Sasha counted off on her fingers. “We can’t send her back. There’s no way to do that. We aren’t going to put a stop to her life process. There are no good long-term solutions for containing her. We have to find a way to fix and reintegrate her into this society.”

  Cooley said, “In a year you’re making a run back though the portal. The space station near Saturn will be up by then. You could bring her there and have them put her in hypersleep, transport back to Mars, or Earth. Have them take care of her there. Proper doctors and scientists.”

  “So she’s not our problem anymore?” Kal said.

  “Yes,” Cooley said. “One year of isolation won’t be too punitive, if she did what you said. It’s reasonable.”

  “Alone,” Sasha said.

  “She’s not alone,” Kal said. “She has the Carys.”

  Sasha shifted in her seat, looking at the floor with a frown. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

  Kal looked at Sasha then. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “You think she’s never lonely?” Sasha countered.

  “I wouldn’t be able to guess.”

  “You were alone on that ship. She is too. I think she deserves a chance. Too soon to give up on her. We haven’t even tried.”

  “She hasn’t even tried to kill you, that’s true,” Kal said.

  Cooley and Sasha stared at her.

  “She attacked me. Her intent was to kill. There’s not so many people here on Demeter—forty-six thousand light years away from home, give or take—that I think we can sacrifice any of them on the chance Sif can be rehabilitated.”

  Cooley nodded slowly. “I see your point.”

  “You left me alone out there,” Kal said. “Alone with a hybrid, as you called her, who tried to kill me, and an AI who might decide to jump in my brain anytime.”

  Sasha’s face looked drawn. “I did what you wanted us to do.”

  “You’re the captain. You did what was best for the majority of the crew. Without regard for the one left behind.”

  “You were on the ship, Kal. Even if you think I would abandon you, you must see I wouldn’t abandon the ship, too. I knew you could do it.”

  “You knew you could get to Demeter on the pod and that there was another ship here. You didn’t need the Ocean.”

  Sasha was fully alert now. Her look intense in the way that used to make Kal squirm. “The Ocean is my ship. You’re my pilot. I wouldn’t leave either of you behind. I trusted you with the Ocean.”

  “You had no choice. You would have said that to any of the crew left behind.”

  “That’s not true, Kal.”

  Kal made a scoffing noise against the roof of her mouth. “You trusted me more?”

  “Yes.” Sasha’s face was baffled, as if she didn’t recognize Kal.

  Cooley looked like she wanted to melt through the floor.

  “You don’t know what she’s like.” Kal liked this feeling. She enjoyed their discomfort.

  “Okay,” Sasha said. “I trust your judgment. We’re having a council so we can exchange ideas.”

  “It didn’t sound like that.”

  Sasha groped her elbow as if it ached. “None of us want a compromised human running around loose on Demeter. I know she needs to be restrained. We can’t trust an AI-human hybrid. We all agree on that, right?”

  Cooley nodded.

  Kal licked her lips. “That’s not what I mean. I just…”

  “We don’t want Sif and the Carys running around wild on Demeter, putting all of us at risk. We can’t know what the Carys or Sif are thinking, and we can’t trust them to tell us the truth. Right?”

  Sasha was trying to make Kal feel better. It was having the opposite effect.

  “I—I—” Kal couldn’t go on.

  “You had the mission go sideways on you,” Sasha said. “I don’t blame you for fearing Sif. It’s reasonable. I’d be furious too. We can’t trust her.”

  Kal was trying to gather up the shreds of her thoughts to stop the wholesale condemnation she had encouraged, which could also condemn Kal herself, if they knew. “I’m not trying to say there’s something in the nature of a hybrid that makes her, makes them untrustworthy. Only that the combination of the Carys and…and Sif is a bad one. It’s the Carys I don’t trust. Not Sif. If that makes sense.”

  “What’s the difference, now?” Cooley said. “I don’t think they can be extricated from each other. At least not with what we’ve got to work with here. So to talk about one is to talk about the other.”

  “I can’t think of it that way,” Kal said. “I won’t.”

  Cooley was exasperated. “I thought that was your whole point?”

  “I don’t trust the Carys, but I won’t make a blanket statement about hybrids. If that’s what they are. Rai, for example. Rai was a hero.”

  “After she decided to stop attacking the passengers and crew,” Cooley said.

  “We all make mistakes. That’s what learning is. She and I got the Ocean safe here. Together.”

  Cooley quirked her mouth. “That’s true.”

  “Credit where credit is due,” Kal muttered.

  Sasha sighed deeply. It wasn’t like her. “What do you want, Kal?”

  “To make the decisions for this council, it would seem.” Cooley was living up to her name, gazing at Kal with a cool, assessing look.

  Kal held up her hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize the anger I still have about the way things played out. It’s not Captain Sarno’s fault. I apologize.”

  “Apology accepted.” Sasha didn’t quite meet her eye.

  Kal tried to make it right. “What I meant to do was contribute. If you have any questions for me, I’ll answer. Other than that, I bow to both of your greater experience.”

  Cooley was appeased. She even smiled. “A young captain without fire wouldn’t be worth her salt.” She leaned forward, the chair chirping with her movement. “You did something none of us have done. No one has ever done, as far as I know. That alone deserves you your place here. We value your input. Your decision has equal weight.”

  Blinking and out of breath, Kal took this in. She nodded.

  Sasha said, “I agree.”

  Cooley leaned back. “Where does that leave us? Options. One: Leave Sif Elfa where she is. Do a health check to confirm her well-being. Two: Release her to a containment room here in camp. Allow Noor and Flicker to examine and consider extraction or rehabilitation. Three: Leave her where she is without any checks. Send her back in a year. Four: Some other combination of the previous choices.”

  She turned to Sasha. “Captain Sarno, what do you prefer?”

  Sasha was nodding slowly, thinking. “I would have Chyro
n, Flicker, and Noor assess her on the ship and proceed from there. I would not release her to camp without their opinions.”

  Cooley turned to Kal. “And you?”

  “Captain Sarno’s suggestion is one I support.”

  “It’s a reasonable next step,” Cooley said. “I concur. We’ll allow them time to prepare and then proceed with the assessment. A further council will convene to hear their recommendation and determine the next phase.”

  “Agreed,” Sasha said.

  “Agreed.” Kal was sweating and limp. She was grateful the chair held her up.

  She had to speak to Noor.

  When she got back to the biohab, Noor had already gone to bed. It would have to wait.

  The next morning, early, Kal found Noor in the comm structure, fiddling with a transmitter. She got her to come out into the air, where they could walk and be alone.

  Kal explained as much as she could, leaving out everything about the Land.

  Noor’s expression gave Kal a chill.

  “Do you know what you’ve been doing?”

  “What?” Kal bit her finger.

  “You’ve been anthropomorphizing a machine.”

  “She wanted rights. Remember?”

  Noor flung her head back like a horse avoiding the bridle, wild in refusal. “There it is. There it is.”

  Kal waited for her to say more. The heavy breaths Noor took seemed to be an attempt at cooling down from whatever fury Kal had kicked up.

  “Machines—” Noor said slowly, her eyes fixed on Kal, “don’t—want—things.”

  “I know, but—”

  “No but. It’s not the same, Kal. Even huge machine brains like a starship AI doesn’t want anything. That’s an Earth-evolved mammalian or piscine or—or biological construct that does not apply to AIs, biomorg or not.”

  Kal wanted to argue. Noor hadn’t been through what Kal had. All the studying and PhDs in the world couldn’t compare to Kal’s insight now. Although she didn’t say anything, Noor interpreted the set of her chin.

  “That’s where you fucked up. And if you don’t correct your thinking you could blow us all the hell to pieces, one way or another.”

  Shoulders sinking, Kal felt a glimmer of fear. Noor wasn’t prone to hyperbole.

  “It didn’t feel—” Kal began carefully.

  “No. Not feel. You feel. We feel. Rai does not feel. She processes. And she doesn’t process shit she isn’t told to.”

  Kal spoke fast so Noor wouldn’t cut her off again. “Rai is capable of deduction and independent decision-making.”

  Noor shook her head. “She builds decision trees. Calculates odds. Makes statistical estimates and weighs input in an unemotional and unfeeling way. Because she’s a machine intelligence, not a biological one.”

  “You don’t think she can evolve.”

  Noor’s eyes closed. “She can upgrade. She can learn in a rudimentary sense. She can’t experience the world. That’s part of what being a biological intelligence is. Moving through sensory experience and creating an understanding informed by it. A two-year-old has more complexity in her brain than the most sophisticated AI we’ve built so far. Wherever you think we are, we’re not. We’re not there yet. And Rai doesn’t want anything. Whatever she did, she was programmed to do. Someone else could have wanted something and told her to do it. She didn’t come up with it on her own.”

  “The Carys…”

  “The Carys didn’t want anything either, Kal.”

  “So why did the Carys do it?”

  They began walking again, the dry stalks of grasses brushing against their thighs as the two of them shared a path meant for one.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you thought about it?”

  “Of course.”

  Kal decapitated grass pods as they walked. She was angry and not sure why.

  Noor said, “Someone sabotaged the mission through Physis, is all I can come up with.”

  Physis was the second portal, the one that had swallowed the ship Carys and all its spacefarers but Sif.

  “A person on the ship? It couldn’t have been Sif. She couldn’t have wanted the Carys inside her like that.”

  “I don’t pretend to know why people want things inside them,” Noor said dryly.

  “It killed people.”

  “All we know about the Carys and what happened there is thanks to Sif. We don’t know what really happened.”

  “Stop slapping down theories and give me one of your own.”

  Noor looked over at Kal in surprise at her tone. She shrugged. “Okay.”

  They walked for a long ways, further and further from camp. Noor didn’t say anything. When Kal stole looks at her she could see Noor’s forehead creased in concentration, so she didn’t interrupt.

  Kal had led their walk, though she hadn’t really thought about it. When they reached an empty hollow Kal realized she had meant to come here, so they could sit down out of the wind on the short grasses.

  Leading the way to the center of the hollow, Kal sat down. Noor stood for a while, staring off at the horizon, before finally coming back to herself. She sat down next to Kal.

  “My best guess—hypothesis, considering the limited information at my disposal—is two possible options.”

  Kal nodded.

  “Yarick, or persons unknown.”

  Kal tried to tamp down her frustration but it came bursting out anyway. “It took an awful lot of thinking to get to the obvious.”

  Noor was taken aback. “I have to follow the threads.”

  “Do your threads lead you to a conspiracy? At Aldortok, for example? They built the ships.”

  “They commissioned the ships.”

  “You don’t want it to be Aldortok?”

  “Of course not, but I wouldn’t rule them out because of what I want.”

  Kal sighed deeply. “This isn’t helping me. You’re not a very good investigator.”

  “You’ve had more time with it,” Noor said, stung.

  “Not really. You were there at the beginning.”

  “My point stands. Blaming the Carys and Rai is missing the point.”

  “You’re missing the point. If fucking Rai is in my fucking head, I’m screwed.”

  “I don’t think it’s likely. There’s some other explanation.”

  “Explain to me. Make something up that makes sense, Noor. Use your big brain.”

  “You’re not as nice as you used to be,” Noor said. “I’ll make that observation.”

  “You wouldn’t be either if you’d been through what I have.”

  Noor gave her a sympathetic look. Pitying, even, which Kal didn’t like.

  “I’m sorry. I forget sometimes. The pods were crazy enough. I can’t imagine being on the ship by myself.”

  “It wasn’t fun. It was a job.”

  “That’s what we’re doing.” Noor scratched at the ground to get to the dirt.

  “It’s a job but it’s our lives, too. There aren’t any weekends. No vacations. Not ever.”

  “It must have been a relief when you got here?”

  Kal had kept all the seed heads she’d yanked from grasses and was compressing them between her thumb and index finger, one by one. They gave a satisfying crunch when she squeezed them.

  “It was sometimes,” Kal said, remembering the tableland.

  “You got involved with someone,” Noor said, hesitating a little.

  “I got involved in the life here. The people.”

  “You like Roan.”

  Kal swallowed. It was strange having the other crew here, observing her life and choices on Demeter. When it had only been herself, she hadn’t had to think about what other people expected her to be. She’d been new to them, the biohabbers. Noor had been around enough to observe Kal’s crush on Sasha, back on the Ocean. “Yeah.”

  “I’m happy for you, if you’re happy.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  Noor nodded. “
That other thing wasn’t going to go anywhere. He seems pretty nice. He can fix things.”

  “There’s more to him than that.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Kal gave her a look. “Really. Everyone underestimates him. Think he’s a mechanic or something. Anyway. That’s their problem.”

  Noor cocked her head. “Why is it a problem?”

  Kal thought of her fantasies of herself and a couple others stealing away from Demeter, flying the Ocean somewhere else, home even. It wasn’t the kind of thing she could say aloud. Ever. Not if she wanted to keep her rating. “It’s not, if it doesn’t bother him. You can’t tell anyone about all this.”

  “If I believed it, I would have to, Kal. You know that. But I don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t think I’m colonized?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Is there a test for it?” Kal had wanted to ask this earlier but had been afraid there was, afraid to have something proved definitively. Would she be locked up too, if it were true?

  Noor smiled. “I know you, and I’m very familiar with Rai. I don’t see any sign of Rai in you.”

  “She could be hiding.”

  “I don’t think so, Kal.”

  Kal’s head fell forward. She believed Noor. She pressed her palms against her forehead. If it was all hers, she would never be unhappy again. She would never take anything for granted again.

  She might as well get all her fears out now. “Roan and I hardly have to talk anymore. We understand each other without talking.”

  “You think that’s proof Rai’s in your head?” Noor shook hers. “You’ve gotten to know him well. Very well, if the rumors are true. So you can communicate through body language and looks. Not surprising.”

  Kal felt her stress level lowering like water draining from a tank. “The electricity. I felt a shock when we were together. A huge electric zap.”

  “I don’t know about that. I haven’t had sex in a while, Kal.”

  Kal laughed.

  “Static electricity built up in the roller? Lightning strike nearby? Or some kind of hallucination after deprivation.”

  “You think I was hallucinating?”

  “He’s pretty hot. I might hallucinate. Out of body experience, you know.”

  Kal shifted gears, out of her own self-obsession. “Do you like anybody here?” Kal knew Noor had no interest in anyone from the Ocean.