Chapter 3
THREE
MARIA
When I woke, the room was dark, I was warm, and there was a soft blanket over me, tucked all the way up to my chin, all things that caused my sleepy mind to spin with confusion.
I'd gotten so used to waking up on a hard surface, slightly chilled, that the feeling of being comfortable was startling.
I opened my eyes, and a soft light filled the room, circling around the bottom edge of the far wall, gradually increasing in brightness until the room held a warm, rosy hue of sunrise.
I was in a large, soft bed, in a room with an oval window looking out into a dark sea of stars.
"Lyrien," I murmured, the events of the previous day coming back to me in a sudden flash of relief.
He had led me to the room, and at the sight of the bed, I immediately went to lie down in it, even though that weird goo had been dripping off me the entire walk to the room.
I must have been exhausted. I'd spent every night cycle on the station, crawling around in the tubes, sleeping during the daylight hours when I could, only to be awoken to be brought to the lab to be put under again.
Whatever they did to me, they did while I was unconscious, but when I woke from it, I never felt rested.
For the first time in a long time, I felt rested.
I'd gotten away. I was safe.
There was a subtle terror behind the comfort of those thoughts, the fear that maybe I was wrong, maybe this was another experiment, and the moment that I really leaned into it and trusted it, they would take it all away.
"Did you rest well, Maria?" Lyrien's voice was rich and dark, soothing, but also rather close.
It was deep and masculine-sounding to me, and my mind automatically went with that classification.
"You slept for a long time. We have left the station behind and are currently on a course for Shek’invitali-controlled space. "
The last time I felt this well rested had been back on Earth.
"Would you be able to take me to my home planet?" I asked. "To Earth?"
"I don't currently know the location of your home planet," he said. "But the Shek’invitali might have that data."
His voice still sounded so close to me.
"How do you do that?" I asked. "You sound like you're right next to me in bed."
"You are inside me," he said. "I can create and place vocal emitters anywhere. If it makes you more comfortable, I can sound as if I am across the room."
His voice shifted as he spoke, moving across the room.
"Is that the same with cameras?" I asked.
"What I have is not quite the same thing as a camera, but yes, I can move my optics anywhere inside of me," he said.
"Could you not?" I asked, pulling the blanket tighter around me.
"Will you explain further?" he asked. "I am uncertain as to what your question means specifically."
I took a deep breath.
Sometimes it felt hard to explain the things that made me feel uncomfortable, but Lyrien didn't press me.
It made sense. He was some sort of alien artificial intelligence after all.
He didn't have impatience or emotional reactions that would bog him down and cause him to insist I answer right away.
He could be doing a million other things while he waited for my response, never losing the thread of our conversation.
The fact that I didn't have to worry about him and his reactions made it a little easier to sort through my mind to find the right words for the moment.
"I haven't had privacy since I was kidnapped," I said. "And the thought of having you watch me while I sleep makes me uncomfortable."
"I will remove my optical sensors from your sleeping chamber when you no longer occupy it, and in the meantime, I will disable them," he said without hesitation. "I already removed them from the room set up for your daily biological care. You have complete privacy in there."
A small door on the far side of the wall slid open.
"Would you like me to remove my audio sensors and projectors in your main sleeping chamber as well as the visual ones?" he continued. "If I do that, you will need to shout if you are in distress for me to hear you through the door."
"No, you can leave those," I said. "But can you only listen for when I say your name? You can write code for that, right? So you aren't paying attention to me all the time?"
"I don't function the way you are thinking, but yes, I can ignore general sounds coming from your room, similar to the way your species can focus on sounds and tune out others," he said.
Right, I shouldn't assume an alien-built artificial intelligence would work the same way as software trained on the collective sum of human knowledge and opinion. But how did he know about the audible processing capabilities of my species?
"How did you know that about my species if you don't know where my homeworld is?" I asked.
"There is a data package attached to your native language file," he said.
"It doesn't provide the location of any of the worlds your species occupies, but it has information about your biological needs and medical care, and is tagged with a warning asking that the Shek’invitali be contacted if one of your kind is found.
For example, it contains data on what types of food are safe as well as palatable. May I enter?"
"Yes?" I said, confused by what he was asking me. Wasn't he already in the room?
The door slid open, and a drone rolled in, carrying a covered tray.
Oh, he was asking for permission for one of his robots to come in. I felt myself relax a little more at the small display of consideration in asking my permission to enter the space after I had expressed my discomfort. He listened and adjusted his behavior.
The drone held the tray straight out near the bed, and legs projected down from the tray, turning it into a table.
The drone then took a small box out of its compartment and set it down on the ground next to the table, and tapped on it.
The box unfolded until it was the shape of a lumpy beanbag armchair made out of a soft, fuzzy fabric.
The drone then trundled out, and the door slid shut behind it.
"I'm inside you, and you still asked for permission to enter?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "This, and every space designated for your use, is yours for the duration of your time on board. You have full control over how the spaces are set up, and what is allowed in them."
"Do you do this for all your passengers?" I asked, startled by the level of privacy.
"I have not had passengers before," he replied.
There was a strange tone to his voice that sounded almost embarrassed. It was interesting that he was programmed to project emotions, but not that surprising. If he was designed to interact with people, projecting emotions was a quick way to keep people calm and at ease.
"So this is as new an experience for you as it is for me," I said. "Please let me know if there is anything I do that makes you uncomfortable."
"I will," he said, a note of surprise in his voice.
I slid off the bed and went over to the open door that led to the biological care chamber, as he put it.
Inside the room was a toilet and a shower that matched what I had learned to use on the research station.
I stepped back into the bedroom as he said he had removed audio sensors from the biological chamber.
"Lyrien," I said. "I would like to ask you a question that is awkward."
"There is nothing..." he hesitated. "There is very little you could ask me that I would find awkward to answer."
That was interesting. He had started to say that there was nothing I could do to make him feel awkward, but then changed what he was saying. Just that little shift in how he said things communicated that there clearly was something he didn't want to talk about, but he also didn't want to lie to me.
For a piece of software, he was very emotive. It also implied he could start speaking without fully generating his thoughts.
"For my biological needs," I said, gesturing at the small room. "What do you do with the waste?"
I was curious about that.
I was curious about everything. I had spent months in outer space with bona fide aliens, and they hadn't been willing to answer any of my questions.
They hadn't even been willing to show me how the toilet worked.
It took several days of the smell building up before one of them came into the room they used as my cell and flushed it for me.
The mechanism had been out of my reach, required force to press, and blended into the wall.
For the duration of my stay on their station, I had to stand on top of the toilet and pound the wall with my fist to flush it.
All I wanted was for things to be easy and to know what was going on and how things worked.
I craved information like water, and I had been a prisoner drowning in a desert.
The only person on the research station who even acknowledged me as a person was Evangelia, and that was to coerce me into doing what she wanted.
"All waste is taken into my waste processing tanks and is turned into soil and fertilizer for my gardens," he said.
"You have gardens?" I asked. "Why?"
"I enjoy tending plants," he said. "Along with being a source of pleasure, they come with additional benefits, such as oxygen production for my internal atmosphere, nutrient mass generation, and being an excellent trade resource for other spaceships and space stations.
Fresh food is a valuable commodity out in space. "
"Can I see the garden?" I asked.
"Of course," he said. "But first, I would prefer if you ate and submitted to a medical scan so I can ensure you aren't carrying any pathogens that might hurt my garden."
"After a shower," I said.
I took care of my bodily functions first. The mechanism to empty it was at shoulder height and had the words 'Remove Waste' written on it in my language. I gently stroked the words, and the toilet lid slid shut from the sides, startling me as it made a sucking sound, like a high-powered vacuum.