Things Fall Apart: Chapter 11, Part 2
Our Story So Far - Click here to access past entries!
Starship Bellerophon was minding its business, on a long return cruise from an exploration and mapping mission, when it suffered disaster, ripping a chunk out of the ship and leaving most of the senior officers and crew dead. Most of the ship's AIs are missing from the network, also presumed dead, with evidence pointing to a massive, internal "attack" by those AIs.
The survivors' mission, now, is simply to hold their ship and their people together; figure out what happened to them, and why; and get to a safe port! En route to the nearest beacon on the time-compression network, in hopes of finally calling for aid, Bellerophon received a distress call, and discovered that they were not the only ones to suffer catastrophe. Only three crew survived Almaty's destruction, along with the compromised AI of the disaster beacon.
Now, Bellerophon has encountered another ship in distress—a more mundane engineering problem on a civilian ship, but one that left them stranded for almost two megaseconds—three weeks. The fact that no-one answered their call earlier suggests a much wider problem, which the crew must now contemplate as they complete their latest rescue.
Lieutenant Cadotte was not, ordinarily, an opportunist. They were, however, a bit impulsive.
Most people, they knew, perceived them as actually being pretty strait-laced, while also never asking why Cadotte carried so many augmentations. That would be impolite, after all, and one thing about Spacers was that they tried to be polite. Space only worked as a place for humans to live if everyone remembered that space itself wanted to kill you, and other humans were your best defense.
Cadotte was, in fact, a thrill seeker, and for those few people who did ask the right question, they made no bones about admitting it. They came by every replaced skull segment, vertebra, and nerve honestly. They spent exactly no time lamenting the injuries that led to their gradual drift into cyborgism, despite the mishaps. Some of those, in retrospect, could have been avoided. Better planning, more fallbacks, that kind of thing. Others were truly random, strokes of bad luck that nobody really could have foreseen.
All this to say, Cadotte found themselves with a shrinking window of time to dive in with the NDI, to try and revive and help the twins back to sanity and usefulness and community. Once Wasserman was done with his sims, the ship would be back underway, and much faster than before. At New Norfolk, either the entire ship's network would be purged as a threat; or other, more expert cyberneticians would be given the job of nursing the twin back to health and finding out what they knew.
Cadotte doubted the net would be purged. If this issue was more widely spread, there might well be some concerns and even heightened robophobia, but most Spacers saw AIs as people. A purge, therefore, would be cold murder. The possibility was there, but it was small.
As to the other possibility, however... Cadotte found they were quite unwilling to leave this matter to strangers. They weren't quite sure why. They had not had much time to get acquainted with the reset Castor and Pollux. As far as they knew, nobody had, except maybe Chef and the other AIs. Still, to Cadotte, they were part of the ship, part of the crew. They did not quite go so far as thinking of them as part of the family, but it was a fine line, given that their augmentations made it easier for them to interact with the AIs at something closer to their own level.
This was not for strangers to do.
So it was that Lieutenant Wayra Cadotte chose to deliberately interpret the grudging permission they'd received almost a megasecond ago as a mandate. Having stood the watch and been relieved, they retired not to their quarters, but to a lab bay, where the Neural Debugging Interface waited.
They were not completely foolhardy. "Chef, I want you monitoring me closely as you can without diving in beside me. In particular, watch my vitals; watch my neural net for shocks; and watch for the least sign of contagion."
Chef looked concerned out of the screen. "Do we think this thing could jump to even an augmented human like yourself?"
"We don't know anything about it, is the problem. We've had no time to analyze what's left of the processors that were affected; no time to analyze the Almaty beacon out there asleep, and not enough evidence from other sources to know what other effects this had. If it hadn't been for the disaster beacon's explicit efforts to make a data connection to spread it, we wouldn't even know for certain it was a virus. The only reason I'm not only willing, but eager, to dive in to talk to the twins is that you were pretty sure they were unaffected by that virus."
Chef considered. Not for the first time Cadotte marveled at the artistry that went into Chef's facial expressions. It was not that they doubted he had emotions—they had no doubts about it at all. It was that, left on his own, he would have no reason to express emotion so visibly on his "face". But it was, in truth, one of the most mobile faces she'd seen on a sentient being. Of all the AIs, his emotions were the most present, his face the most reflective of his moods. As someone who had lost some of their own facility for expressing emotion, Chef's...performance, for lack of any better term, had always fascinated them.
So now, he looked at them levelly, concern showing, and said, "But I might be wrong. Or, it might turn out I was actually also compromised all this time, and it just expresses itself more subtly."
Cadotte wished they knew how to soften that blow, but they didn't. So they just said, "Yes. I don't believe you're wrong, but I can't discount it. Going in with the NDI is probably foolhardy, but I'm not going in completely unprepared or without knowing all the risks."
Chef said, in a tone that said he knew better, "You could just...not. Let someone else take the risk."
"I was just thinking about that, as it happens. And no. I can't. Partly because I just don't want to let a stranger do this. But also...what if there isn't anyone else?"
There had still not been any formal discussion of that possibility. Nor had there been a shipwide announcement of the decision to "bypass" the relay, which the senior staff were now pretty sure no longer existed. The repairs and replacements by Espinoza had meant that, even if the relay was close, New Norfolk was no longer far, and so, nobody questioned the change in plans.
Chef, though, was privy to just about every high level discussion. He just nodded, unwilling to voice the possibility. It occurred to Cadotte that New Norfolk was as much his "home" as it was much of the crew's. It wasn't just the ship's home port. The station itself was a vast city, anchored in orbit above a dead but resource-rich rock. It was surrounded by dozens of smaller village stations. It was one of the regional capitals of the Tau Ceti Treaty Systems; a hub for government, commerce, an even tourism. Millions of people and AIs called it home, even if, like Cadotte and Chef, they spent most of their time on ships.
They were distracting themselves, now, procrastinating, when they had already decided they had very little time to waste.
They took a deep breath, said to Chef, "Here we go!" Then put the glittering contacts on the appropriate locations on their head, and pushed the button.
As I've mentioned before, this story had its origins in a gaming scenario, and most of my main characters are drawn from player-characters in that scenario, with permission. Point being, the original "story" had many point-of-view characters, since each player contributed their own pieces.
When I started to adapt this to a more linear format, I found myself sticking pretty closely to Singer's point of view. I didn't even fully realize I was doing it 'til about Chapter 8, but I also saw no reason to go back and change it. Maybe if I do yet-another pass, in the future, to pull this together as a true novel and not a serialized story, I'll pivot some of the chapters to change the point of view, but for now, it's fine where it is.
So it is that this is the first chapter not from Singer's point of view, or even with Singer in the room. If I'd felt strongly about sticking to Singer, we'd have only heard about this effort from off-stage, as a report. We've already got a lot of those.
From here on, I'm going to be varying point-of-view a bit more often. Not every part, because that could get confusing, but I'm going to be a bit more mindful about whether the story would be more interesting from a different angle.
/m