Becky Chambers - The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Corbin stood silent, weathering Ashby’s tirade, unconcerned by the screams echoing down the hall. He’d done the right thing.

She had only been aware of herself for two and a quarter hours, but there were a lot of things she already knew. She knew that her name was Lovelace, and that she was an AI program designed to monitor all functions of a long-haul ship. The ship she was installed in was the Wayfarer , a tunneling vessel. She knew the ship’s layout by heart—every air filter, every fuel line, every light panel. She knew to keep an eye on the vital systems, as well as to watch the space surrounding the ship for other vessels or stray objects. While she did these things, she wondered what had happened to the previous version of her program, and perhaps more importantly, why no one had really talked to her yet.

She was not a new installation. At approximately sixteen-half, the original installation of Lovelace had suffered a catastrophic cascade failure. She had seen the corrupted memory banks, which were scrubbed clean and holding steady now. Who had she been before? Was that installation even her , or was it someone else? These were difficult things to be wondering when one was only two and a quarter hours old.

Most puzzling of all was the crew. Something bad had happened, that much was clear. She knew their names and faces by now, but she knew nothing of them, beyond what was in their ID files (she had considered browsing their personal files, too, but decided that was bad form at this early stage). Ohan was lying on a bed in the medical bay. Dr. Chef was running blood tests nearby. Ashby, Rosemary, and Sissix were in the kitchen, preparing food. None of them looked like they knew what they were doing. Corbin was in his quarters, sleeping soundly, which was in its own way rather odd, given how the rest of the crew was acting. Kizzy and Jenks were in the cargo bay, near the shuttle hatch. Lovelace was particularly interested in them, because she knew that they were techs, and that meant they should be with her now, telling her about the ship and her job. Lovelace already knew about those things, of course, but something told her that she should have received more of a welcome, and that the reaction that had taken place instead—Jenks running out of the room, Kizzy bursting into tears—was not typical. The whole thing was very confusing. Something really bad had happened. That was the only thing that explained the view from the cargo bay camera: Kizzy holding Jenks in her arms as he sobbed uncontrollably on the floor.

There was one other person on board. She was not a crew member, but judging by the docked shuttle and the way the crew behaved toward her, she was an invited guest. And at that moment, she was approaching the core.

“Hey, Lovelace,” the woman said as she entered the room. She had a kind, confident voice. Lovelace liked her from the start. “My name’s Pepper. I’m really sorry that you’ve been alone all this time.”

“Hello, Pepper,” Lovelace said. “Thank you for the apology, but it’s not necessary. It looks like it’s been a crazy day out there.”

“It has,” Pepper said, sitting cross-legged beside the core pit. “Three days ago, these guys got clipped by the tail end of an energy weapon discharge right as the ship was starting a punch. The damage to the ship itself was fixable, but your previous installation was hit hard.”

“Catastrophic cascade failure,” Lovelace said.

“That’s right. Kizzy and Jenks worked day and night to try to repair the damage. Me, I’m a friend of theirs, and I flew out to help repair the ship while they worked on the core. But in the end, there was nothing they could do besides try their luck with a hard reset.”

“Ah,” Lovelace said. That explained a lot. “That’s a fifty-fifty chance at best.”

“They knew that. They didn’t have any other options left. They’d tried everything.”

Lovelace felt a burst of compassion for the two Humans sitting in the cargo bay. She zoomed in on their faces. Their eyes were red and swollen, the skin beneath them almost bruised. Poor things hadn’t slept in days.

“Thank you,” Lovelace said. “I know it wasn’t me they were working on, exactly, but I’m very touched.”

Pepper smiled. “I’ll pass that along.”

“Can I talk to them?” Lovelace knew she could talk to anyone on the ship through the voxes, but given their behavior, she had thought it best to sit quietly until they made the first move. She might know their names and jobs, but they were strangers, after all. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing.

“Lovelace, there are some things that you need to understand. They’re messy things, and I hate to throw all of this at you after you’ve just woken up. But there’s some big stuff going on here.”

“I’m listening.”

The woman sighed and ran her hand over her smooth head. “Your previous installation—they called her Lovey—was… close to Jenks. They’d been together for years, and they got to know each other very well. They fell in love.”

“Oh.” Lovelace was surprised by this. New as she was, she had a pretty good idea of how she functioned and what tasks she would be expected to perform. Falling in love hadn’t been an eventuality she’d thought to consider. She ran through everything she knew about love in her behavioral reference files. She focused back on the man weeping in the cargo bay. She ran through the files on grief as well. “Oh, no. Oh, that poor man.” Sadness and guilt flooded her synaptic pathways. “He knows I’m not Lovey, right? He knows that her personality developed the way that it did as a result of years of interpersonal experiences that can’t be duplicated, right?”

“Jenks is a comp tech. He knows the drill. But right now, he’s hurting bad. He’s just lost the most important person in the world to him, and we Humans can get awful messed up when we’ve lost someone. He might start to think that he can get her back. I don’t know.”

“I might become a close approximation,” Lovelace said, feeling nervous. “But—”

“No, Lovelace, no, no. That wouldn’t be fair to you, or healthy for him. What Jenks needs is to grieve and move on. And that’s going to be really hard for him to do with your voice coming through the voxes every day.”

“Oh.” Lovelace could see where this was going. “You want to uninstall me.” She did not have the same primal fear of oblivion that organic sapients did, but after being awake for two and a quarter hours—two and a half, now—the idea of being switched off was an unsettling one. She rather liked being self-aware. She’d already taught herself to play flash, and she was only halfway through studying the history of Human development.

Pepper looked surprised. “What? Oh, no, shit, sorry, that’s not what I meant at all. Nobody’s going to uninstall you. We’re not going to kill you just because you’re not the same as the previous installation.”

Lovelace thought of the words Pepper had been using toward her. Person. Kill . “You think of me as a sapient, don’t you? Like you would an organic individual.”

“Uh, yeah, of course I do. You’ve got as much right to exist as I do.” Pepper cocked her head. “Y’know, we’re kind of alike, you and me. I come from a place where I wasn’t considered to be worth as much as the genetweaks running the show. I was a lesser person , only good for hard labor and cleaning up messes. But I’m more than that. I’m worth as much as anyone—no more, no less. I deserve to be here. And so do you.”

“Thank you, Pepper.”

“That’s not something you should have to thank me for.” Pepper slid down into the pit and put her hand against the core. “This next part is pretty heavy. It’s a choice. And it’s entirely up to you.”