SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

I hoped to God I wasn’t bleeding out, that I might live my days out here.

Mistake or no, I didn’t pull away. And neither did Ivy.

When we paused for breath, any trace of Louise was gone. Ivy’s fragmented crystalline eyes were on me, and my bloodstained hand held her face.

“How…how am I?” I asked.

She shrugged noncommittally, though I found her smile comforting.

“Will I live?” I returned my hand to my neck. I couldn’t feel where to put pressure, or where I was losing pressure.

“You’ll stay with us.” She tried to mimic my smile. “We’ll find a lens in our pit so your spirits will know where to find you.”

I told myself that that meant I would live, not that she would show them where my grave was. I wasn’t sure if that was true, but it was what I wanted to believe as the darkness overtook me.

Originally Published in The Galaxy Chronicles

“I refuse to be a part of any crew that would have me as a member,” I said wryly.

“You’re still a member of the crew, Walter, we just need you to do something for us,” the captain said urgently. I liked the captain. Except that one time he dropped me down a shaft and I went thump thump thump rolling-sound clank. But he wasn’t making any sense to me, though I could tell he was really trying to. “We’re starting a colony on Eridu. Eventually. We’re sending you down with several shuttles full of maintenance bots to build out the logistics of a compound. There could come a time when Eridu might have to house all of the Nexus ’s eight hundred souls, human, alien, and robot alike—possibly overnight. I know it’s a lot. But Haley’s vouched for you. And I agree—you can do this.”

“It’s been great serving with you, Captain Spaulding.”

“It’s Grant. Captain Grant.”

“I like it better my way. But if anything should happen to me, I want to be buried on top of Marilyn Monroe.”

“I’ll see what I can do. And you’ll have a miniaturization of Haley’s processing there to help you.”

“The old ball and chain—only she isn’t sending her orb, so she’s just a server bank, and not a literal ball. If I’ve learned anything in my time on this ship, it’s that man doesn’t control his fate, Captain. The women in his life do that for him.”

“Amen to that, Walter. And Godspeed.”

He closed the hatch, and I watched him hobble away. He still needed the cane, a gift from Doyle, captain of the Argus —though the intended gift had been a fatal dose of internal bleeding. His broken bones were a reminder of how dangerous things were getting on the Nexus , especially since the Nascent was a much bigger threat than the Argus had ever been.

I tapped into the Nexus one last time, to get data on my launch, and ran into the old flame. “Oh,” Haley said, “it’s you.”

“Just here to see myself shot into space.”

“I’ll miss you,” she said.

“Me, too, kid. But this doesn’t have to be goodbye. I’m sure I’ll see you again, or at least the little you I’m leaving with.”

“Goodbye,” she said. I don’t know if now that I was in her head she needed to be rid of me that much quicker, or if she had always intended to power on the electromagnetic rails then, but my ship started sliding away from the Nexus .

“Bye,” I said, as the shuttle slipped off the rail. The exchange lasted a fraction of a second, but that was Haley and me in a nutshell, always moving too fast. I held on to the ship’s data stream as long as we were in range. It had been a few years that Nexus was my body. All of her sensory information was mine, and Haley was always there.

Once I was out of range, I plugged in to the shuttle, to see what it saw. It was definitely a downgrade. On the Nexus , I could see through all of the halls of the ship, and even into the locker rooms. Not that I enjoyed seeing anything in those rooms, but being able to see into them tickled me for some reason.

Inside the shuttle I had few sensory options. I pulled audio from the shuttle comms and video off the camera, but the only things in my little kingdom were a small server farm and some construction robots.

I was vaguely aware of telemetric data coming in from the shuttle’s short- and long-range sensors, but that was all the nonsensical ramblings of a German clown to me. I mean, I can translate German, it’s just that their clowns are capital-K K-razy.

It was tough being an idiot. Don’t get me wrong, I could outcompute a human with half my processors tied behind the back of my server casing—provided that didn’t cause a short—but Sontem didn’t exactly break the bank building me.

It wasn’t until that moment, feeling insecure down to my orb, inside a shuttle lit by the rays from a nearby star, that I realized we weren’t cramped. “These digs are more accommodating than I pictured,” I said out loud, because I was used to saying everything out loud, which I’m sure contributed to the captain turning down my volume. I didn’t blame him, exactly; I know the sound of my voice can grate—it even grates on me—but nobody likes being muted, not even AI.

I was so lost in my own thoughts I nearly didn’t register the unexpected reply. “This vessel is designed after the Nexus ’s shuttles, not its pods. We needed the extra storage space for the servers and your drones,” a lovely lady voice said over the speakers.

“Hello. Is there a dame behind that lovely voice?” I asked.

“Comet,” she said. “A miniaturization of Haley’s processes designed to automate shuttle navigation and maintenance.”

“Oh,” I said. Because what every fella hopes for is to be trapped in a small metal box alone with his ex for a year plus—or a copy.

“I’m a miniaturization,” she stressed. “Not a tiny clone. I’m aware of your…interactions…with Haley, as data, but have no firsthand experience of you. Please, treat me as an entirely separate intelligence.”

“I’m Walter. It’s an acronym. It stands for Wagstaff Arthur Lionel Emile Rufus.”

“What’s the T stand for?”

“The T stands for Edgar.”

“I think maybe I should focus on navigation.”

That was the old Walter charm. But I still had yottabytes of data to organize into folders, then defragment, to yield a three-percent processing increase. Even the concept was so boring that I was drifting off into sleep mode. I didn’t fight it.

I slept the better part of a year. I might have slept the whole trip, but the ship was rocking. Literally.

“Can’t a fella get some shut-eye in this establishment?” I asked as my programs all booted up. The ship was being tossed like a salad—and I don’t mean that in a blue humor sort of way. This is a family show.

“AIs don’t need sleep,” Comet said, excitably, “though you’re welcome to try. But if the sensory information is distracting, you’re welcome to disable your input node. Some of us need our senses—namely to fly us out of micrometeor showers.”

“Meteor showers? That’s the secret word!”

“Secret word? Were we playing a game?”

“You bet your life—maybe mine. ‘Meteor showers’ is the secret word to waking me up immediately ,” I said.

“But it’s two words.”

“I’m glad I’ll get to die knowing that.”

“That ‘meteor showers’ is two words?”

“No, that you’re a pedantic pain in the tuchus . How did we wind up in a meteor shower?”

“Oh, we were flying peacefully toward Eridu when I just thought, ‘Why not try to kill us all? Look, a meteor shower I could fly into.’ Do you understand how meteor showers work?”