Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

One of the major differences, and I think the one that interested Singer the most (anybody who tells you that AIs don’t have agendas or emotional involvement in their decisions is living in the twentieth century), is the way the Sea Slug folks handled debt as opposed to the way the Synarche does.

Let’s be honest here, debt is a mechanism of social control. That’s one point Singer makes over and over again, which he didn’t have to work too hard to convince me of: clades believe heavily in repaying your debts to the family, and they weaponize that ethos. Emotionally speaking. Guilt is a currency.

The Sluggers assume that everybody has a societal debt which is to be paid forward to others, to the best of their means. I agree with that, on a lot of fronts, especially since it circumvents a certain kind of progenitor guilt trip that was the foundational logic of the clade I was born into. The Synarche, meanwhile, believes in obligations that flow both ways between community and individual, and I also agree with that. It’s an ideal worth serving. But no system is perfect, and it uses those obligations—incurred by creation—as a social control on AIs and a means of enforcing their service. A kind of indenturehood that, to be fair, does pay for the resources allocated to developing new AIs, but if you think somebody hasn’t tweaked the system to the Synarche’s advantage, well. All of history involves somebody taking advantage of somebody else.

It’s not a perfect system of government, I guess I’m saying. But it does level the gravity incline somewhat. Which I think is what the Republic of Pirates takes so much offense to, given their singularity-devour-star philosophy. And then there’s the black market, and the trade in illegal and stolen goods. Can’t get those with a resource allotment.

Good times.

While I was pondering politics—and pondering how much Singer had rubbed off on me—I kept fiddling with the architecture. I finally hit the right spot, or the right angle, and the panel popped off into my glove. Wiring behind it—nothing I could make headway on, though I squinted for a few moments. There was a splice, nice professional job. Not microcircuitry: whoever built this hulk meant to be able to repair it with materials at hand. Which meant they expected port opportunities to be limited, I supposed.

“Maybe it is a smuggler,” I said, my heart sinking. Not as bad for us as a pirate, and there were bounties on recovered ships and property. But not great, either. “So what do you smuggle that’s that big, Singer? Contraband is little things. Cultural treasures. Dangerous foodstuffs with a thrill market. You don’t smuggle a bridge or a big stone Buddha offworld, do you?”

“Depends on how much the big stone Buddha is worth on the illegal art market.”

“Keep going in,” Connla suggested. “Let’s see for ourselves how bad it is.”

“Wish we’d done something else with the afternoon,” I said glumly.

“Relax,” Singer said. “You’re forgetting something.”

I waited for him to finish, and put the panel cover back on. Force of habit, again: not leaving stuff lying around where it could kill you.

“How much resource-justification do you think that artificial gravity tech is worth?”

I had been standing up, bitching to myself about the gravity. I stopped, one hand on the galley wall, stunned.

“What if it’s under military interdict?”

“I don’t think it is, because I can’t find any blank spots in my science banks. So let’s assume for now that we get a finder’s fee for that,” Singer said cheerfully. “We’re in the black, Haimey. All we have to do is get this prize back in reasonable shape, and I can buy out my inception, and you and Connla can take a nice long vacation someplace sandy and circuit-corroding.”

“Like you have any circuits to corrode.” But I said it automatically. My head was still swimming. Recovered tech—or a new innovation—retrieved from an outlaw vessel. Yes, that would clear a lot of our obligation. Maybe all of it. Justify our resource footprint for a good, long while.

And I had to have it pointed out to me. Some hot-shit salvage operator I turned out to be.

“Okay,” I said. “I feel better now.”

There wasn’t much else interesting along the way to the core. A string of cabins like a string of beads, punctuated by short corridors similar to the first one, with somewhere between two hatches and five. There were hatches in what had become the floors and ceilings; inconvenient for now, and more evidence of a retrofit. It looked like the corridors served as storage and as pressure locks, but if so, they hadn’t worked: the hatches were almost all closed, but nowhere within the chambers was there atmosphere.

Or people.

Or bodies.

Or, I realized, any clutter. I mean, sure, space. We are all tidy, or we don’t last long. You tuck things away, hang them in nets, magnetize them to bulkheads, clip them to strings. But these people had been living under gravity for at least the duration of this voyage—okay, that was an assumption, but a pretty safe one—and they would have left something lying around. Alien socks rolled under bunks. Hairbrushes, toothbrushes, scale brushes, feather oil, hoof picks, claw combs. The organic dust that living bodies all seemed to shed, no matter what the integument holding their innards together is.

This ship was clean. I swiped a glove along a brown-anodized metal surface in what looked like a bio or chemistry lab. Not even a trace of powder showed in my headlamp. Maybe it was a survey ship from another galaxy that had met a terrible accident, and not smugglers at all? That would also explain why it was so strange and far away.

“I think they got decompressed,” Connla said, putting voice to my nausea.

“And then somebody came through and closed all the hatches and turned off the lights?”

“The hatches are probably on an emergency override,” he said reasonably. “Would you want a hatch that didn’t shut when the next chamber decompressed?”

“But these didn’t. Or not quite fast enough.”

All three of us were silent for a moment, contemplating being explosively decompressed out of a ship while it was inside folded space. Would you even feel anything? Would you have time to be scared?

I shook my head, trying to mix my wits together. “And the lights are probably on a timer. So… sure. The ship blew, somehow? And having blown, the safety interlocks belatedly kicked in and it just shut itself down and waited?”

“How would it blow that fast? It’s big. Lot of atmosphere volume.”

I touched the next hatch. Opened it.

Looked out through a doorway over a precipice into nothingness and brilliant, folded stars.

I FORGOT THE PAIN IN MYafthands for a moment, and was fiercely grateful for the intensity of the gravity pinning them to the corridor floor. Because I was leaned out precariously over the Empty, and my stomach felt like it was dropping into it. I leaned on the hatch, which also dragged me forward. My upper body was weightless, while my lower body was heavy—in the most peculiar, spine-stretching way. I stabilized the hatch door, relaxed my grip, and let the hand drift. Then slowly, with my core muscles, I reeled myself back in.

The beam of my headlamp vanished into blackness, revealing nothing. Beyond its light, though, I could discern what must be the vast bubble of emptiness at the heart of the alien ship—and that the far side of it was open to space. There, framed in darkness, was the shimmering platinum band of the white coils, and there were the streaked rings of lensed light: the twisted images of stars and the whole long arm of the Milky Way.