13

You Need Therapy

“You know, I'm not entirely convinced that this isn't just a way to trick me into doing your chores for you.”

I'm hearing Miranda's voice with perfect fidelity, the way she hears it, piped directly from her auditory nerve pickups to my own neural lace. It sounds even higher than usual, thin and breathy. She's been through dozens of spacewalks in VR sim, over and over with me pouncing on every mistake, but it's different when the vacuum is real. I hope I wasn't this squeaky my first time out. Not that anyone alive would remember.

“There's no trick, Princess. My chores are exactly what you're doing. I haven't cleaned the antenna arrays, greased the railgun track, or replaced any rad shielding tiles since we left Arachne. Saved up all the really shitty jobs for ya. So if you wanna turn around, head for the Ring Band, check into a casino and order champagne from room service, just say the word.”

She sighs inside my head. “Marcus, I did a training rotation in trauma surgery on Mourelle Gateway. I'm pretty sure your dirty hull arrays aren't going to scream and spray arterial blood. I'll be fine.”

Her last words are nearly covered by the loud wail of vacuum fans as she starts the airlock cycle. Nearly. That's the beauty of neural lace comms—so long as she can hear herself, so can I.

“That was fast,” I say. “I'm still on the ladder. Give me a second to get to the bridge and I'll patch my video feed to your view. Turn your mag-clamps on now and get tethered up before you exit. Remember, the Cat is spinning, so there'll be a little bit of force pulling you away from the hull. The sky is down and the outer hull of the cargo hold is up. You'll be a fly walking on the ceiling. Don't get disoriented.”

“Yes, I understood that the first three times you told me. Stop fussing. I'm already clipped in. I'll be fine.”

“Say that after you've spent six hours cleaning static-charged dust off electromagnets and checking every single shielding panel on the hull. Don't get cocky. Tired people make mistakes, and space doesn't forgive.”

“Yes, yes, okay, I'll be careful. Doors are open. You want me to wait?”

“Yeah, give me a tick or three. Almost there.” I mute her from my transmit for a moment, and I'm moving quicker now, leaping up the access ladder in a series of low-gravity jumps and catches. I've already passed the bridge…

Here we are. Fourth level. Server room.

“Leela, this your cue. You ready?”

Her avatar doesn't manifest at all, just a disembodied feminine hand in the air before me, giving a thumbs-up sign.

“I have 133 emulation images spun up. Just feed her a plausible explanation and I'll be fine. Seamless.”

Right.

This is it.

I've stashed the imaging drive behind the hatch, stuck to the inner wall with zero-g tack putty—Sixteen petabytes of storage in a black and yellow box with an integrated steel handle, heavy. I leave it for now and turn my attention to the servers, rows of them, mounted in floor-to-ceiling racks, behind doors of heavy steel mesh.

I fumble in the pocket of my sweatpants for the keys, old style mechanical ones with notches. I open each door carefully, then the gray metal junction box on the wall, exposing a row of heavy-duty black breaker switches, hand-labeled in thin red marker.

There's an orderly shutdown procedure, of course, but who cares? The drives are all gonna get wiped anyway. I rest my hand on switch array.

Okay, all ready. I open the transmit channel again, and click through a neural lace interface.

“Patching in now.”

A transparent spinning pattern of dots superimposes itself over the darkness and the rows of circuit breakers.

“Took you long enough. Okay, sending video. Can you see now?”

I jolt. Gets me every time. I'm standing on the hull, stars whirling above me. One dainty gloved hand rises into my field of view, turns back towards the viewer, waves.

I can still feel my own hands on the breaker box, the deck under me, the spin gravity pulling me down. Disorienting. I squeeze my eye shut for a moment, but of course the picture's still there, direct to brain.

“I told you to wait in the airlock.”

“I got bored,” she says, with a dismissive wave of that hand. I feel absurdly short, seeing through her eyes, like I'm kneeling on the deck plates, but I guess this is normal for her. I banish the view to a smaller frame in the corner of my field of view, re-orient myself to where I'm really standing.

“Stick with the program, Princess. You need to take this seriously.”

“I'm cleaning dusty antennas, Marcus. It's not that big a deal.”

“Vacuum is vacuum. Be careful. First one's thirty meters up and around to your left. Go.”

On the tiny inset picture, her perspective begins to move.

Okay, here we go. No point in waiting. I yank the main breaker switch, cut the power. The blinking lights across the server racks go out. There's a click as my VR interface audio dies. The picture of Miranda's viewpoint freezes, then corrupts with a wash of pixels, static, colored lines. More clicks.

Seconds tick past.

“Hey. Can you hear me?” Leela asks. I look around, but there's no avatar.

“Yeah, but I'm not getting visuals.”

“Not sending any. I'm short on bandwidth. Anyway, I'm bringing up the fake network now. It'll take me a moment.”

“Sure. Can you get me comms back?”

“Working on it, working on it… there.”

Miranda's voice cuts in. “-arcus? Can you hear me? Marcus?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“What's going on? My suit says it just lost telemetry uplink, and I can't access the network. Do you see anything on your end?”

The old, flat, physical server room monitor screen displays a remote boot sequence as I invent a lie.

“Ah, yeah, I see some loss of signal, and your video feed's gone. You might just be too far around the hull from the broadcast hub. It would work better if you were farther out. You wanna come back in and check it?”

Please say no please say no please say no.

“Just try a different frequency range.”

“I'd love to. Wanna give me back my computer access so I can?”

She sighs. “Don't be a pain. Fine. I'll try moving around the hull a bit and see if it gets better.”

Okay, let's hope this works. I just have to juggle the twin tasks of keeping Miranda busy instead of suspicious, and running the network reinstall. Leela's juggling a lot more, and I can only hope her confidence was justified.

We're committed now, and if she can't deliver…

Well, out of my hands. I scroll through setup menus, make a few rapid configuration choices, some of which I actually understand. In a few moments I'm watching a progress bar when Miranda's voice comes back on the radio.

“Oh, there it is. Check if you see my telemetry. I'll start moving back towards the antenna array and see if it cuts off again.”

There it is. “Okay, go slow, but I think we're clear now,” I say, “I have your signal, five by five.”

Which is, of course, a complete lie.

Right now, all 133 servers on the White Cat, most of them little more than re-purposed desktop computers running open source software built by hobbyists, are completely down and having their solid state memory drives wiped and reinstalled.

What's relaying Miranda's voice to me, what her neural lace is talking to, and getting convincing answers from, is just… Leela.

Leela, talking through a cheap home networking box bolted to the inside of the cargo hold. Leela, projecting 133 fake network addresses. Leela, who promised me that she could fake it, could fool Miranda for the five hours and seventeen minutes I'll need to reinstall every computer on the White Cat. Leela, the state of the art AI that's just coming to grips with not being a little girl.

I'm committed now. I just have to trust her and hope Miranda doesn't try to use that fake connection to actually control the Cat. Because right now, every little electronic box on the ship is wiped out, four percent of the way through a plain blue progress bar. Right now, all we can do is drift, two inert metal cylinders flung through interplanetary space.

Let's hope I don't screw up the reinstall and strand us out here.

“I'm at the first antenna. Can you still hear me?”

I take a deep breath, work a smile and a lie into my voice, and say the words I need to say.

“Yeah, I can still hear you. Okay, you're going to need to manually shut down the main power feed…”

I drone on, talking her through the process.

Why didn't I just take the simple way out?

When it's finally done, Miranda comes back in through the observation deck airlock. I see her sylphlike silhouette walk across a metal beam between windows before I hear the lock open, close, and start to cycle.

When the inner lock door hisses open, she's just standing there, partially collapsed hood under her arm, against one cocked hip. Disheveled, tired, dragging a rumpled hairnet off her crown of obsidian braids. She looks at me and grins.

“Well?” she says, with a lilt in her voice.

“Satisfactory.”

“Really? That's all? C'mon. I did awesome and we both know it.”

Why is she so cocky? Why is she so happy about this? Wait—she's seen me grinning, too. And she doesn't know I have the Cat back. She thinks I'm smiling because I'm proud of her.

Maybe I am. A little bit.

“Then why do you need to hear me say it?”

One glittery black eyebrow lifts.

“Okay, okay, you did good. Don't let it get to your head, though. You're arrogant enough as it is.”

“Yep,” she says, cool as a cup of water, and tosses me her hood as she saunters out. I snag it out of the air with one hand. She spins and gives a long, catlike stretch, arms overhead, wriggling his shoulders this way and that, then shoots me a glance over her shoulder.

“Be useful and unzip me, would you?” she purrs, “I hate wrestling with this thing.”

What the hell happened to Miss Don't Touch Me Ever? I know she thinks nothing of actual work, or of me. So why is she looking flushed with victory from one, and fishing for praise from the other? I've seen a lot of fake smiles on her. But this is the first one that touches her eyes.

I shouldn't let my guard down. I know the stuck-up bitch is still in there somewhere. But I'm a hormonal idiot, so I kneel down, put my hands on her back, and start loosening the vac-seal tabs. She stumbles back towards me as I tug.

“Pull forward,” I say, “I need to get this loose.”

“I was pulling,” she says, “You're… really strong.”

Yeah. She doesn't weigh much in spin gravity. I put one hand flat across her shoulder blades and hold her steady as I pull with the other hand.

“I gotta be. It's not just for staying healthy in spin grav. Pilots need to be able to pull heavy acceleration.”

“Do you…” she asks, and pauses with a little catch in her voice, “… do you have to do that a lot?”

“Did a lot of hard burns when I was jacking cargoes,” I say, loosening another seal. “But I was lifting heavy long before that. Most Belters do some, just to be prepared. I just kinda got addicted.”

“You got addicted to picking up heavy things and putting them down?”

“Sounds simple when you put it like that, but… it's about the feeling of accomplishment.”

“What do you mean?” she asks, turning the other shoulder towards me. My fingers work their way down the other side. Her back muscles are tiny and defined beneath the suit, firm but soft and yielding.

“You try to do something hard, something you don't know if you can actually do, and then you do it, and you feel good about it. Like, other people can hate on you, or they can kiss your ass, 'cause of how they feel about you, or if they want something, or for a million other reasons, but plates don't lie. A hundred kilos is always a hundred kilos. And if you lift it, then you lifted it.”

I yank another tab.

“There. All done.”

She turns towards me, and gives me an expectant look, batting those big purple eyes.

“Did you always want to be a pilot?” she asks.

I reach out for the tab over her left collarbone. She could easily reach it herself. I don't know why she doesn't. Somehow it just seems natural for me to keep going.

“Nah. I was just some kid on Venus when my dad started an asteroid mining company. Liked to read books and stuff. But I wanted to be a part of what he was doing.”

As I tug, she put both hands on my chest to brace herself, give me something to pull against. Her hands are small. And warm. I'm sure she can feel how hard my heart is pounding, but she doesn't say anything about it.

“So you're not actually a meathead, you're a nerd,” she says.

I wondered how long it would take her to start mocking me again. But when I look at her, she's not wearing a sneer. She looks… mischievous. Is she testing me somehow? If she is, I don't know why.

“I'm both,” I say. “I walked in the door of the gym and I never felt more out of place in my life. At first I couldn't put much weight on the bar. I felt like everyone was laughing at me, even though they never actually did. But I wanted to be part of what my dad was doing. I wanted to be a real Belter. I wanted to fly. So I had to do what flyers do—here, turn this way. Yeah, like that—I had to give myself permission to do something I didn't think was part of who I was. And I…”

I trail off, not sure if I wanna continue, but she doesn't say anything. Just keeps looking up at me with those big, beautiful eyes. They don't look alien anymore. They just look like Miranda.

“… and I really, really love flying. It's kinda what I do.”

“So you started working for your dad's company? Warnoc Engineering? What happened?”

“I thought you checked me out when you… you know. ”

Set me up. Stole my ship. Tried to put a collar on me.

She's got this habit of looking just a hair sideways when she makes eye contact. She's looking at just one eye. My organic one. I suppose the other one just looks like metal and glass.

“I know the company went bankrupt,” she says, “but I don't know why. I don't know what happened.”

SpaceX happened. Her family happened. But I don't want to say that. I don't want her to hear the bitterness in my voice when I say it. I don't wanna look weak. Of course, the real weakness is that I care what she thinks of me. But I can't help it.

“Doesn't matter,” I say, curtly. “We're here now. Hunting for your buried treasure. Let's deal with what's in front of us. There. All done.” I smack her lightly on the front of the shoulder. “All loosened up. You're good to go.”

Her eyes drop briefly. To my waist?

Crap. I'm… aroused. Again. I can't tell if the bulge is obvious or not. But it isn't going away.

“Marcus…” she says. And stops. There's something strange in her voice. A hesitation. She swallows hard.

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“You just did. Ah… okay. What's on your mind?”

“… um… just a second, let me turn the cameras off…”

What's she going to say that she doesn't want Leela to hear? I shoot her an inquisitive look, but she's already got that unfocused look in her eyes, looking at her neural display. Oh, well. I suppose she'll tell me once she's done accessing the network.

Oh.

Shit.

The network.

And, in an instant, but too late, far too late, just as my own neural lace flashes “WARNING: unauthorized user access attempt,” I realize that she can't access the network.

I forgot to recreate her user account.

She looks puzzled for a moment, and then unfocused again, but I can see the realization in her face already. Shock, then surprise, then outrage.

“You… You… you slimy backstabbing… low-life! Just when I was starting to…”

I raise my hands and take a step back. “Hey, I just took back what's mine.”

“Why? So you can get rid of me? So you can just push me out the airlock and be done with it?”

“No, look, it's not like that. I'm not a…. Look, I didn't kill you before, why would I do it now?”

“Because you couldn't fly the ship without me before!”

“No, I—”

“Or,” she begins, and suddenly her voice, no less outraged, is lower, calculating, bitter, “or maybe you wanted to do something else.”

“W…What?”

“I've seen the way you look at me. I've seen you…” She trails off, and gestures, wordlessly, and the waistband of my sweatpants.

Oh, shit. She did notice. I'm shrinking back down in the face of this sudden spray of venom, but not fast enough to hide the evidence. I take another step back, trying to think of what to say.

“Well, ” she snarls, “why don't you just do it, then, you creepy pervert? It's the sort of thing you would do, isn't it?”

My jaw wants to hit the floor, but I'm too stunned to open my mouth and say words, too stunned to do anything but take another step back and almost trip over the corner of the squat rack.

She takes a step forward, like she's chasing me.

“Go on, ” she says, spitting her words. “Go on, you coward. Do it. Here—let me make it easy for you.”

Then she grabs the collar of her loosened vacsuit and yanks down, opening it to the waist. Underneath, she's naked. Extremely naked.

Her breasts are full, round, pale and flawless as porcelain, with large puffy areolas around pink nipples that point this way and that in gentle, low-gravity ripples as she moves. Her face is just as flawless, but full of outrage. Full of fury.

What the hell?

I mean, I knew she had a few screws loose, but where did this come from? I don't know where to look—looking away would be weak. Staring at her would be weak, too, in different way. Thirsty. Easily swayed. I don't want to give her the satisfaction.

“Look, Princess, you got the wrong idea—”

“Oh, I do, do I? Or are you just too spineless to admit what you were working yourself up to do? Sleazing your way up to me like that? Putting your big huge pervert hands all over me?”

“Hey, Princess, you're the one who asked me to—”

She's pulled open all the release seams and is yanking her feet out of the inside-out legs of the suit, kicking furiously in a failed attempt to extract herself with some dignity. But there's no dignified way to remove your pants in spin gravity. I can see this realization on her face as she thrashes about, finally getting them lose.

She's not entirely naked, after all. But the translucent black lace panties just frame everything and make it worse. Well, better. In a way that makes it worse.

I trail off, take a breath and try to get back control of this conversation.

“Look, Princess, don't flatter yourself, okay? I'm not a—”

“Not a man enough to admit what you want?” she cuts in, all the way out of her suit now, and stalking towards me as I back away between the weight racks.

The most beautiful woman I have ever seen is chasing me while pulling off her clothes. It would be a fantasy moment if I were a thirteen-year-old boy. But I'm not, I'm thirty-seven, and it's more like an attack. An insult. Like she thinks that I'll take whatever I can get. That I don't have the luxury of wanting to be desired. That I'll grab at any woman I like the look of, even if she despises me. And it's humiliating, because my inner thirteen-year-old is trying to get out.

I'm not indifferent. I just wish I were.

And I'd rather throw myself out the airlock than let her know that. Fortunately, my—ah, physical response—has withered in the face of her icy contempt. For a second somewhere in there, my treacherous brain imagined actually doing it… that icy look of contempt, her lying there, refusing to resist but absolutely unresponsive as I…

Oh, fuck no. No way. Why did I even put that image in my head? I feel like I need to scrub the inside of my skull out with a bottle brush through the ears.

And she's still chasing me backwards towards the windows in slow motion. It's like a bad horror move, except victim number three, the hot one, after taking her clothes off on some flimsy story pretext, has flipped the script and is chasing the monster.

Enough. I plant my feet, and stare resolutely at her eyes. Her eyes.

“Okay, first of all, Princess, no. Not gonna happen. I am not a rapist, or whatever the hell it is you think I am. I prefer my partners willing. And second of all, you are fucking crazy.”

She stops advancing, plants her hands on her hips, making no effort to cover up, and just looks at me. Somehow furious and blank at the same time.

“I don't mean that colloquially. I don't mean it as slang. I don't mean it as funny way of saying you did something weird, or, in this case, completely fucking bizarre. I mean you are literally stark-raving nuts, and you need therapy. Or drugs, or nerve stapling, or whatever else they do now for people who are mentally fucking ill.”

Pale as her face is normally, the color still manages to drain from it. Slowly, she looks around at the windows, the stars spinning around us, the weight racks and equipment. My arms, held up as if to ward her off. My face.

Slowly, she brings her hands up to cup her breasts, folds her arms over them, hunching in on herself. Suddenly, she's deflated, small, her eyes darting nervously left and right, avoiding my gaze. Somehow, she's shrunk from voluptuous to waif with nothing but a change of posture.

And without a word, she turns away from me and bolts for the ladder up to the cabin level, leaving her crumpled vacsuit in the still-open airlock, and me, blinking after her receding bottom.

Wondering what the chicken-fried fuck just happened.

“Told you so,” says a quiet, disembodied voice inside my ear. My face is… warm, like it's being hit by full, unfiltered sunlight.

“Dammit, Leela, were you watching the whole time? You shouldn't be spying on adults when they—”

“Relax. I'm a computer. Sex is strictly a spectator sport for me. And speaking of sex—”

“No. Not speaking of sex. Not speaking of sex right now, or ever. Real kid or replica, you are far too young to be watching this stuff. Especially when it's mixed with crazy. And if you bug me about this little incident again, I will go down to the hold and unplug you. Or possibly just reprogram you with a very large axe. Got it?”

“Okay, okay, jeez. Don't take it out on me. I didn't do anything.”

“No, no, sorry, I know you didn't, it's just… look, just forget about it, okay?”

I stalk over to the lock and slam it shut, leaving Miranda's crumpled suit lying inside, then stomp off towards my cabin. Stomping in low gravity requires skill, so it's more of a theatrical display than a reflex, but I stomp anyway.

Jesus, what a clusterfuck.

Hours later, I'm still staring at the ceiling in the dark when that disembodied voice whispers in my ear again.

“Marcus?”

“Yeah?”

“You wouldn't really unplug me, would you?”

She actually sounds scared.

“Oh, god, no. Of course not. Can't you tell when someone's joking?”

“Yeah, I know. I remember being a person. Like, how to read voice and body language and… stuff. But it's just, well, I'm not a person now. I'm a thing. And if somebody said that to a person, of course it would be a joke. But if somebody says that to a thing…”

“Ssh. You're not a human. But you are a person. I believe that, and I don't think much of anyone who doesn't. I'm sorry I snapped at you, and I'm sorry if that made you think I would ever hurt you. I wouldn't. Now go to sleep.”

“I don't sleep.”

“Okay, let me sleep.”

” 'Kay. Good night, Marcus.”

But a few minutes later, the voice prods me again.

“Marcus?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm not sure anyone will.”

“Will what now?”

“Believe that I'm a person. I mean, what if I'm just… fake? A philosophical zombie? Like, I'm just acting like a person, and there's nothing inside?”

“Hey, relax. Didn't we go over this? If you're having these thoughts, there must be something doing the thinking, right?”

“No, no, I know that. That's not what I'm worried about. I know I'm real. But I can't prove it to anyone else. I can't even prove it to you. “

“You don't need to. You talk and act like you're real, and that's the only test we can apply to anybody, right? So I believe you're a person.”

“… really?”

“Yes, really. In fact, you're a person who won't let me sleep.”

“Okay, sorry.”

I close my eyes and drift. I don't know what to make of today, of Miranda's latest dose of crazy, but at least I have the Cat back. The hum of her air cyclers seems more familiar, again, somehow. Worry about everything else tomorrow.

“Marcus?”

“Hmm… wha’?”

“Could I have a hug?”

Something in me wakes up a bit. What?

“A… Leela, that… didn't work, remember? You don't have a body.”

“I know. I didn't say 'can.' I said 'could.' Like, if it were possible, would you?”

She sounds… sad.

“Oh. Yeah. I guess I would. I mean, sure, yeah, I would, if you wanted it.”

“Thanks.”

“You… doing okay?”

“Yeah. I think so. I just get lonely, sometimes. When you're both asleep. I know it's, like, a human thing, but I miss sleeping. Like, that chance to just… go unconscious for a while, and then you wake up and it's a new day, and things are all different. I miss a lot of things. I'm sorry, I know it sounds silly, I know I shouldn't be acting like a kid when I'm not really one… I just…”

“Hey, hey, hey, take it easy. It's okay. You're the first AI that was imaged from a child. This has gotta be tough in whole new ways that literally no one's dealt with before. Whatever you need, you tell me, okay? Would you like me to stay up with you a while?”

“Thanks, but… I know you need sleep. I feel better now, a little. But there is one thing…”

“Yeah?”

“Is it okay if I watch you sleep? Listen to your heartbeat?”

There's a small pause, and then she rushes to speak again, words tumbling over each other…. “Ohgodno that sounds supercreepy when I say it out loud. Sorry. Forget I asked.”

“No, no, it's okay. It does sound a little bit odd, but… I think I understand.”

“You do?”

“You remember being human. That comes with a whole lot of baggage. Humans are pack animals. We need other people. And you still feel some of that, I guess.”

“Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. I mean, I've been reading books and stuff. Psychology. Erik Erikson, and Duncan Black, and Jean Piaget. I remember everything I read. But I don't know how it applies to me. It just doesn't tell me where I fit, you know?”

“You're something new. If there's psychology books about people like you, then maybe you're going to be the one to write them. That's okay. It's okay to not have all the answers right now. You have plenty of time to work them out. You just have to be patient and give that time to happen.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

She's silent for some time, just long enough to make me wonder if the conversation's over.

“Marcus… do you have any kids?”

“What? No, I'm single. I spend most of my time in space. Doesn't exactly leave time for meeting a nice girl, ya know. Why?”

“Do you want any? I mean, if you ever get married or something.”

“Never thought too much about it. I guess so. Why?”

“Just curious. I should let you get some sleep. Is it okay if I… ah… what I said? You know, the…”

“Yeah, go ahead. You gonna be okay?”

“Yeah, I'll be fine. Thanks, Marcus. You're… well, just… thanks. Goodnight, human.”

“G'night, computer.”

I close my eyes again, wondering if it will be hard to sleep now, knowing I'm being watched. But it isn't. I'm already sinking into a warm blanket of oblivion, and it's not entirely so bad to think that somewhere out there, in the zero of the night, someone is listening to my heart.