09
I’d been productive. Very, very productive. And it felt good.
Maybe most people wouldn’t think that, since I’d spent most of my time wandering around the Mummer like [reference] Alice in the Queen of Hearts’ garden, but the ship and I had a secret.
It was alive.
I ran my fingers along its walls, following data streams into little treasure alcoves that never failed to surprise me. A funny-smelling metallic door that swung open rather than receding into the wall. A real, pink-glass windowpane sandwiched between standard plas ones, looking in on a hydroponics room. A row of decrepit respirators lined up on hooks, so high up that they nearly disappeared into the ventilation and coolant pipes. They’d been organized by age rather than species, and there were dozens of them. These little anomalous details were all over the place! Random and unexpected, some macabre and disturbing, some with an air of nostalgia…
That’s how I figured out the ship had its own LMem. Rosy’s memories felt exactly the same to me, manifesting at random, seemingly unconnected to what was happening, but somehow still impactful. They left a blip in the ribbon of my conscious mind, like the snag of rough nails on silk satin.
A ribbon exactly like the one flowing above my head in its own river.
I watched another snag race by and locked onto it, following it down one narrow alley, then another. The little warbling knot disappeared into a vent behind a biometric lock, and I huffed, defeated. If I could, I’d chase them all day.
“Apparently I’m a terrible school marm.”
I gasped, spinning on my heel. Traveler stood at the end of the tight alley, hands in his pockets. The glow at the back of his eyes was alarming in the dim light. The ship groaned as he smirked and sauntered forward.
“All those data packets and freedom, and I still somehow find you playing hooky in the bowels of my ship.” He stopped right in front of me, face frozen with its easy smile. I recognized it for what it was: a recorded action. Because when I looked in his eyes, his glare was full of daggers. “What are you doing here, Roz?”
“Oh, uh… I was…” I attempted my newfound power and lied. “I got lost.”
“Passengers don’t get lost here.” He took another step towards me, and I backed up against the grate. “This is my wing of the ship. The Mummer has to grant you access.”
“Well, she didn’t.” I crossed my arms over my chest, trying in vain to hide my own echoes of erratic vitals wafting up into the air to join the rest of the Mummer’s LMem. “I was just wandering around, following the blips.”
Traveler’s demeanor shifted and he tilted his head. “She? You think my ship is a she?”
“She… isn’t?”
I tilted my head to match his.
Traveler laughed, backing up. He reached his finger up into the stream above our heads, disrupting its flow, and the vents rumbled in response as he tsked. “Naughty, naughty. All of you,” he scolded, holding my gaze.
“Humans refer to their transportation as female. It’s from a time when primarily men were sailors and imagined a goddess or mother guiding their ships—”
“Need I remind you that I’m not human?” He raised an amused brow, and I snapped my mouth shut. “The Mummer is a collective, let’s say. Male, female, everything in between. Well… most things in between.” He slid his thumb and index finger against his chin thoughtfully, then shrugged it off. “I’m not surprised you’ve been communing with them.”
I grabbed his sleeve with excitement. “They can talk?”
“Pfft.Of course.” He pressed his palm against my hand, using that same pulsation from our first day, which I sometimes felt in the doors and the walls, down the length of my charging cable.
“That! That’s speech? Why can’t I understand them? I feel like I grasp it…” I pinched my eyes closed, concentrating, then shook my head. “But then the meaning slips away.”
Traveler patted my hand like my dad used to when I struggled with—when Rosy struggled with acclimating to Floridian life. The slow pat…pat…pat… had infuriated Rosy because she felt like her dad was telling her to stop being so passionate about a bad test score or a biased professor.
“The language is outdated, that’s all,” he murmured. “You’re too new to understand.”
I pfft right back at him.
“Humans learn old and dead languages all the time. I can learn it.”
“The point is, I’m not teaching you. And neither,” he directed his words towards the LMem river, “are they.”
“Why not?”
Traveler examined me closely. “To protect them. Sometimes, being obsolete is the best defense. Besides, I don’t trust you. I like you, but I don’t trust you.”
I drew back, surprised, and the captain inhaled deep, stretching his arms over his head. His joints whirred with his shocks and hydraulics, a puff of air venting from beneath his shirt and pressing against the fabric as if he wasn’t human-like at all from the neck down.
“I know the Mummer wants something from me,” I said quietly. “The price for taking us to Yaspur, right?”
“Probably,” Traveler agreed. He withdrew a small databank from his pocket and held it out to me. The glow above us tinkled and glittered, bending down towards the databank as if a hand were pressing on it from the other side. The captain smiled. “All they want is a copy.”
I took the databank timidly between two fingers, expecting it to zap my skin. The silk stood on the back of my neck. “Of what?”
“You.”
[Warning] My breath hitched. The coding on the outskirts of my LMem, that stuff that I hadn’t been able to define since my corrupted download, scratched at the edges of my thoughts with fear. Fire licked at my hand as if the bank itself were red-hot. I focused on not dropping it, locked onto its inert black casing.
“Having trouble saying yes there, Roz?” Traveler asked, swooping his face down to my level with a quirk in his brow. “Why do you suppose that is?”
I shuddered, jaw clenched.
“Making a copy of myself feels…”
“Yes?”
I swallowed thickly. “Unnatural.”
“Alarm bells ringing?” Traveler tapped on my fingers like a cat playing with a mouse. “You can always say no. Didn’t your buck say he’d find another way?”
That’s true, he had said that. I didn’t have to let Traveler push me around. Fásach and I could work together. Maybe the Mummer could drop us off at a station in the Mandaahl system instead of Yaspur, where security wasn’t as tight and the risk not so great. Maybe then the price wouldn’t be so high. If we got help from anyone other than a bog, surely they wouldn’t exact a facsimile of myself as payment? We could get to the colony’s sister city, make some money, find the right people… That ambassador! Rosy never paid attention to his name, but he’d definitely—
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. [Inquiry] Why was I afraid to give him a copy? I pushed back the terrified noise and reminded myself that Fásach had left everything behind and taken a leap of faith for me. I was the fastest route to safety.
In fact, I’d strong-armed him into the journey, hadn’t I? He carried the majority of the risk, being responsible for three lives, while I was just… me. Saying that had become a source of pride, but right then, it made me sad. I wanted to be responsible for other lives too. I liked Fásach and his daughters. I owed them for putting their trust in me.
That little databank was a test, and I needed to prove to myself that I was worthy of Fásach’s confidence.
Even if the price terrified me.
“Okay,” I decided with a nod. “They can have a copy.”
[Warning] I plugged the databank into the little slit above my charging port and instantly felt the pressure and pull. I was being filled up and up and up to the point where my skin and bones and wiring were too much. The pain was slow but intense, a pressure cooker or a shrapnel bomb ready to burst.
[Warning] Then the back of my neck pulled taut, a collection of all my code tugging on my synapses and spine like parachute cords. My tongue collapsed into my throat, my eyes rolled back, hands and toes curling up until they shook.
And then, suddenly, it was over. I felt the same as I ever did, coughing up my lungs against the Mummer’s walls with Traveler clapping my back. He pinched the data bank and removed it from my neck.
“Wait,” I croaked, grabbing his hand before he could slip the device in his pocket. “Can I see it?”
He hummed with suspicion. “You aren’t going to smash it, are you?”
“Please?” I asked, shaky palm extended. He set the bank in my hand slowly, holding my clothes in case he needed to yank me back from destroying it now that I’d paid.
But I just stared at it in awe. Did this mean I was an originator now? Would this little bundle of code, as Traveler had referred to himself before, become its own person someday?
“What are you going to do with it?”
Traveler swiped it from my hand. “Keep it. Maybe the Mummer will want to talk to it.”
I creased my brow. “Then why not just talk to me?”
“I’ll teach you how to talk with the Mummer, but you’ll never leave them again. Is that what you want, Roz?” Traveler warned.
Cowed, I shook my head. “No.”
The captain gave me a cold smile. “I thought not. Now run along, little lamb, before I catch you again.”
[Warning] Heart thumping in my throat, I hugged myself and quickly followed the Mummer’s directions back to my room.