30

We're Not Good People

After a few minutes of adjusting the telescopes, I'm not much encouraged.

“It's all open to vacuum,” Leela says. Her avatar is lying on the biomonitor, draped backwards over it, looking at me with her head upside down. It's still canted at an angle, and it doesn't line up precisely, so a few millimeters of the case are inside her image, embedded in her back.

“You hit them pretty good with those pieces of bar stock. I think there must have been a lot more crew on that thing than we ended up having to fight.”

The display hangs in the air, the Cat joined to Tuf Voyaging by a thin thread of cargo cable, spinning us around some common center of mass. A tumbling cloud of debris surrounds us both. I gesture to rotate the image, zoom it in. The entire front end is a twisted wreck, a huge slice of it just gone. The ripped part continues back along the central section, not large there, but a serious puncture, a ragged collection of tears in the hull. I let out a long, slow breath.

“Dunno if I can patch that,” I say. “Not in a few hours, anyway. But I can try. ”

Miranda shoots me an appalled look. “What? Why would you even think of that? Marcus, you just got shot. Do you have any idea what that does to you? What a bullet stretch cavity in human muscle looks like? I had to spend four hours digging fragments out of your ribs, with no surgical team, doing the anesthesia myself. You're held together with stitches and plastiskin. You are staying in that bed for at least a week.”

“Miranda, okay, I get it. But we're out of options here. I can't just teach you to fix this while I'm lying here in the medbay, and Leela's useless for this one—”

“Oh, thanks a lot,” Leela says, grinning. “Just ignore all my superhuman capabilities. Brain the size of your entire body and there you lie, complaining that I don't have thumbs.”

“—so if I don't get out of this bed, we're out of options. I either need to weld that hull, or get the Cat's fusion drive working, or we are stuck floating on whatever course we are on. What course are we on, Leela?”

“Interstellar space. Good news is, if my preliminary calculations check out, we should pass through the LHS 547 system in about fifteen hundred years. Not sure you two can wait that long, though.”

“Someone else would board us first. So lying in this bed isn't on the menu. We don't wanna sit here and wait for the next pack of assholes, so we gotta decide which fix I'm doing. Then we do it pronto and pull some heavy gravities out of here.”

Miranda's face freezes, and her eyes squeeze shut.

“Oh,” she says in a small, soft voice. “Acceleration. I hadn't thought of… Marcus, if you do any high-gravity acceleration right now… I think you… you might not make it.”

She's pinching the bridge of her nose with the fingers of one iridescent-nailed hand. Is she wiping at her eyes? For a moment, her, the bed, the heart monitors, the gray steel walls, Leela's poorly-aligned image, all seem to recede, as if I'm seeing them at a distance.

That's it. We're stuck. Or at least I am.

“Okay. Okay, let's think about this. Work the problem. If I can't do heavy acceleration, then I'm stuck here. So maybe we split up. If I get one of these hulls spaceworthy, then you two, at least, can get out of—”

“No. No. NO.” Miranda transfixes me with those luminescent eyes, and I'm dragged back into the moment. “Look, Marcus, I am NOT leaving. You may not notice it because you're on painkillers, but you're badly hurt. You need ongoing care. I can't just leave you.”

She sniffles and mops at her face.

“I know we've treated each other like crap. I know you think I'm a spoiled brat. You're probably right. But we just… oh, I don't know… we—look, I'm not leaving you, okay? That's not an option.”

Behind her, Leela rolls her eyes and stretches her arms to the ceiling, making a very explicit and not at all child-like gesture with a loop of two fingers on one hand and the forefinger of the other. Small red hearts of virtual light float up where her hands come together.

Okay, so maybe Miranda's been acting a bit… different… lately, but I am not going to dignify that little display with a response. I look back at her, at the slightly pugnacious curl to her lip, like she expects me to try to talk her out of this. I'm not going to.

I don't want me to be left behind, either.

“Okay, so you're staying. Fine. So we can't run, and I think we just found out we can't hide forever, either. Then we gotta find a way to make them stop chasing us.”

Leela titters. “Yeah, sure, boss. Just send them a note. Dear improvised fleet of corporate security, mercenaries, and assorted opportunists and thugs, we can no longer shoot back or run away. We request you kindly refrain from further acquisition-related activities with respect to the most valuable object in the known universe, allowing the undersigned to retain exclusive—”

I glare at her. “I thought I was supposed to be the one doing the black humor. I mean, full marks for creativity, especially for an AI, but do you have any useful suggestions?”

She hops down from the machine and stands beside Miranda. Even with her child avatar, she's the taller of the two, more so because she's a few centimeters off the deck.

“Marcus, I'm sorry. I just—don't expect any miracles from me, okay? I'm a machine intelligence, but that doesn't mean I'm some kind of omniscient superbrain. I'm smart, I can do stuff fast, integrate with whatever network tech is around, but that's about as far as it goes. So just because I can do math faster than you doesn't mean I have any magic answers.”

“Did I ask for magic? I'm just thinking out loud here. Nothing else we can do but work the problem. We have something they really want. That's why they're coming for us. What do we do about that?”

She purses her virtual lips. “I'm thinking, but we have even fewer options than we did last time. No weapons. Talking didn't work. They'll be tracking us with telescopes and lidar now, so even if we could change course, we couldn't hide.”

She runs one hand through her blond curls, twists her neck this way and that to stretch it. She's getting better at playing the part of a human, signaling stress she might be feeling, by playacting a stiff neck that she surely doesn't have.

She continues after a moment.

“We haven't really got much of anything except two messed up ships, a couple more rifles we took from the boarding party, and the Snark.”

“Yeah. What if we threaten to blow our drive core if anyone gets too close? Take the whole business hostage? Buy ourselves some ti—”

Leela's image sticks one finger down her throat, and disgorges a stream of rainbows, stars, and musical notes, followed by a cartoon unicorn that gallops a circuit of the medbay, at head height, before vanishing.

“Okay, okay, dumb idea. Sorry. Forget I said it.”

She's right. It is a dumb idea. Threatening to destroy the prize if we can't win it? And to kill ourselves in the process? I don't know why I would think of that, even on a whim. I just know I don't want to give up. Not now. Not after coming so far.

Leela and I simply stare at each other, out of options, out of words.

I let myself sink back onto the bed. Every clever move it took me to get to this point has all been for nothing. I fought as hard as I could, and as smart as I could, for as long as I could, and now I can't do anything but lie here. It's out of my hands. It's over. I just want to sink into the pillow, ask Miranda for more painkillers, and sleep.

If you can't fight, you run.

If you can't run, you walk.

If you can't walk, you crawl.

But what do you do when you can't even crawl anymore?

Miranda's been quiet through all of this.

She looks a bit of a mess, still wearing some sort of pale blue surgical scrubs, and a hair cap which most of her mane of hair has escaped from. Seems it isn't immune to tangles after all. She looks a little rough… which means I must look like I've been dragged backwards through the pit of Tartarus.

And she still looks plenty all right to me. I'm such an idiot.

She takes a deep breath in, like she's about to step into a cold shower.

“I'm sorry,” she says, softly, almost mumbling.

“What?”

“I'm sorry,” she says again, louder. “For dragging you both into this. I… guess I kinda screwed up pretty badly. Marcus, I know you're still mad at me—”

I could interrupt her here, but I don't. No, Pixie, I'm not mad right now. I'm having very different thoughts from that, and I keep trying to remind myself you're crazy and maybe a sociopath as well, and it isn't working. I'm just sitting here with my tongue clamped between my teeth so I don't say something dumb and make myself look like the most pathetic simp in the solar system.

“—but please believe me when I say that I didn't want it to turn out this way, and I'm glad we made that deal, because you should have gotten half. You deserved it.”

She kinda sounds sincere. Maybe. I should say something. But I don't know what.

“There's… something I sort of wanted to do,” she says, after a moment. “I kinda wanted it to be a surprise, but I guess since we don't know what's going to happen now, I should tell you.”

A surprise? Well, she's certainly full of them. She's about to do or say something crazy again, isn't she? But she doesn't plunge into this one, not until the silence stretches out a long time, and I clear my throat with a little interrogative noise.

“I was just… I was thinking… about what you said. I was thinking… well, what's the difference?”

I have no idea what she's talking about. “The what now?”

“The difference. The difference between us and them. Those men we shot. All the people chasing us. Starlight. Whoever. How is it different, from the perspective of anyone else in the universe, anyone who isn't us, which one of us gets their hands on this thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the results are the same. Someone takes it from us, now it's just them with a target on their back. It's another Artifact War, and even if someone gets away with the prize, then maybe it's just a bigger Artifact War. And when it's over, then what happens? Another coalition? More alien tech monopolies?”

“Someone had to end up with it,” I say. “Might as well have been us. I thought that was what you wanted.”

“Yes, it was. It's what all of them want, too. Uh, for themselves, I mean. So, everybody wants this for themselves. Who wouldn't? We're just dogs fighting over a bone. So what difference does it make which dog wins?”

“Uh… from everyone else's perspective, none, I suppose. You're right about that. But… what are you getting at, here?”

“What if it didn't have to be that way?”

“What?”

“I was thinking… what if we could give it to everyone? Not the Snark, I mean. Our research data. Just post it on the internet. For anyone who wants to read. Break the monopoly. Let everyone in.”

She's hanging over me, holding onto the bedrail so hard that she doesn't even notice she has boosted herself into the air. I stare up at her like I'm seeing her for the first time. Same tiny stature, shapely even through the rumpled surgical scrub gear, same waves of shiny obsidian hair, same huge violet eyes, staring back at me and glistening. But I never expected this.

“Who are you,” I ask, “and what have you done with Miranda?”

She's staring back at me, and her lower lip quivers, but she doesn't look sad. She looks… relieved.

“Marcus, I'm serious. I know you think I'm a useless spoiled little brat. Maybe I am. I did some really selfish stuff and I don't even really feel sorry for it most of the time, even though I know I probably should. I'm not a good person. I know that. Maybe I'm just a mess.

“But, you know, I think maybe you're not a good person, either. I know about your past. How you got all those people killed. And I understand why you did it, but still—you stole from people at the point of a railgun. Because of what you wanted.”

“Miranda, I never claimed I was a good—”

“No, listen, that's the point. That's the whole point. You saved my life when you didn't have to. After I treated you like… well, I treated you pretty badly. You could have just taken the prize and ran. But you didn't. And you didn't have to look in the mirror first and ask yourself who you were. You just… decided. Even though you're not the good guy. You were good to me.”

From where I'm lying, the overhead light is behind her, shining around her like a halo, and somewhere in the interaction of too many painkillers and my exhausted brain, she looks like a saint. Or an angel.

“I thought about what you said on the trip out. We were arguing about the Coalition, about the drives, about the stranglehold they have on everything… that we have on everything, because, yes, you're right. It's not fair. And my family, we're a big part of that.

“But I'm not just some caricature of an evil corporate overlord, Marcus. That exists only in your head. I'm a person. I can't be perfect. I tried so hard to be perfect, and I can't.”

Her voice cracks a little, and her eyes are filling up again. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I can't be perfect. I just can't do it.”

Should I reach out for her hand? I can't decide. She draws a deep, shuddering breath, regains control, and the moment passes.

“But we're not the good guys in this story. Maybe no one is, ever. Maybe we're all just people. But maybe we don't actually need to be good people to have permission to do the right thing. Maybe we can just decide to do it.”

And that's when it all clicks into place for me. When I finally understand.

The wealthy, spoiled brat, and the bossy corporate battle-axe, and the precise surgeon who dragged me back to the light, and the strange sensitive girl who cuddled up to me and cried in my arms… are all the same person.

I've never really seen her. I've seen all the things I resented. The Starlight Coalition. SpaceX. Her family and their vast fortune. A privileged woman-child poised to inherit everything and appreciate nothing. An indifferent universe where some people struggle to survive while others can fail over and over again and never suffer the consequences.

I've been putting all my baggage on her.

It doesn't excuse the blackmail. It doesn't mean she isn't nuts. I'm pretty sure she is. The girl needs some serious psychotherapy. But maybe she's spent her whole life at pressures that would rupture an oxygen tank.

She's not the enemy. She's just a person.

“Miranda.”

“Yes?”

“Are you serious about this? I mean you'd be giving up a lot of—”

“Money? I thought hard about that. There are ways it could work. We'd have run it like an open-source software company, charge for tech support, and take donations. There's a lot of companies that would profit from new tech, like the effector, or more fusion drives. It wouldn't build us an empire, but it could work.”

“I thought an empire was what you wanted.”

“So did I. But I think maybe it was just about my family. Maybe I just wanted to prove to them that I didn't need their permission to build something important.”

She gives me a slightly sheepish smile, and fucked as we are, I can't help but echo it just a bit.

“I just wanted to win, you know? To prove that they were wrong about me, and that they should have given me a share. The way you wanted a share. Not really for the money. Just out of respect.”

She's right. It wasn't about the money. Mostly because I didn't think we'd even get this far, but also because half meant I mattered. That she saw me like a person.

The way she's looking at me now.

God, she's beautiful. I want to reach out to her. I want her to crawl back up here and cuddle up to me again. I clamp down hard on that stupid idea. Force my face into a blank mask of calm.

“Marcus,” she says, softly, “you're staring.”

“You're full of surprises, you know that, right?”

“Before, you thought I was crazy.”

“That is one way to be full of surprises. Besides, I think we're out of sane options. Let's give it a try. Leela?”

Her avatar appears standing by my pillow, about eight inches tall. I don't know if she was elsewhere in the room before. I wasn't paying attention. But I didn't hear any smartass remarks, so maybe not.

“Yes?”

“Do we have any tech data on the Snark now? Just what you've gathered so far? Can we broadcast it?”

She kneads her hands through the folds of her big fluffy virtual skirt and looks pensive.

“I don't have all that much. I don't know what all is in there. Seriously, this is a combination of archeology and a chess match, except the civilization is alien, and the rules of chess are different. And no one will tell you what they are. And they change from move to move.

“I know it looks like I'm just sitting here, listening to you two work your stuff out, but I've got six computational threads running in the background trying to talk to this thing. I could have exobytes of data when I'm done, if I'm ever done, and we'd have to broadcast it all at once, because it'll give away our location.”

“They already have that. And Miranda wants to piss her family off.”

“I understand the feeling. I'll see what I can scrape together, get it organized somehow. You wanna go ahead and do that now?”

“No.”

My head snaps around. Miranda's lips are drawn tight, into a hard line. “Not yet,” she says. “There's something I need to say to Leela, too.”

I don't know if there's something about human nature, or, well, simulated person nature, too, but whenever someone says “We need to talk,” or something like that, it never happens right away. There's always a moment of settling in, of preparing. Sometimes beer is involved.

In Miranda's case, it would probably be that awful-smelling bean-water stuff. If somebody hadn't put six or seven stray rounds through the galley, and her coffee machine. Leela, on the other hand, is sprawled, with a blanket that doesn't exist, in a big stuffed armchair that doesn't exist, either. Apparently, it's story time.

“Leela. There's something I want to say to you, and it's probably a little overdue.” Miranda says.

Leela cocks her head to the side, a familiar gesture. It's like an exact model of that thing Miranda does. I wonder if that's intentional.

“I owe you an apology, too.

“I built you, and I thought that meant I could do what I wanted with you. I tried everything I knew how to do to make you a person, but then I treated you like a thing. I know it's terribly hypocritical of me to say this right at the moment I have to ask for your help, but… I really am sorry. For how I brought you into this world. For all you had to go through. For not understanding that—”

“Miranda, stop.”

Leela unfolds her arms and drifts down to floor level, her feet passing through the litter of plastic wrappings and discarded surgical detritus that litters the ground around my bed. For once she doesn't seem to mind. Or notice.

“Let me take it from here. I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm good at thinking. It's pretty much the only thing I do.”

“I'm just trying to—”

“Shush. Still the robot's turn.” Leela's avatar, without any visible transition, is now holding a large… seashell? I'm thinking there's some reference here that I'm not getting.

“I was real mad at you. I was mad at you for lying to me, for not caring about me, for taking away my family, and my future, which I know doesn't really make any sense, because they were weren't mine, they were Lily's. And I might remember being her, but I never really was.

“Thing is… why was I angry? I thought a lot about this, and… Well, it's because when I found out you were my creator, I guess I somehow, in my unconscious mind, and it's weird that I even have one, but anyway, on some level I started imagining you as, well, not MY creator, but THE creator. Like you were some sort of goddess breathing out the divine spark of life.”

“Hold on,” I say. “Don't tell her that. She already acts pretty snooty. Don't give her ideas.”

Miranda turns her face to me, shocked for a moment, maybe even hurt, until she sees me meet her eyes and smile, and she relaxes, and makes an almost playful swatting gesture at me. Hmmm… better keep the teasing pretty gentle for the time being. She's probably a little raw. It's been a rough week.

Leela watches us for a just a moment before continuing.

“But that's the thing. Gods have power over everything. The whole universe. Anything that's wrong with it is their fault, because they could set things up however they want, and if anything went wrong, they could just fix it. Omnipotence means omni-responsibility.

“So if I make you out, in my big metal head, as some sort of creator goddess, then you're to blame for everything bad that happens. Especially the bad stuff that happens to me. It means you're cruel and uncaring and indifferent.

“But… I heard you on the radio, at Sedna… you know, when you thought you were going to die. And I watched you crying all over Marcus's shoulder, and I… I thought about that.”

Miranda's face goes full crimson. I don't think she stops to remember that Leela is always watching. But she doesn't say anything, just listens, lips slightly parted. I don't know what to think, either, although it strikes me that Leela no longer sounds the least bit like a twelve-year-old.

“I realized I was wrong. You're not a goddess. You're an ordinary, fallible, fragile, imperfect, falling-down-and-screwing-up human being. Just like the real Lily Trentfield. Like Marcus. Like me.

“So, when you brought me into existence, it wasn't shitty and painful because you were some sort of divine sadist. It was shitty and painful because that was the only way you knew how to do it at all. And even if life is really hard sometimes, it's still good.”

She turns to me now.

“You wanna know why I know that? I know that because of something you said. I didn't understand it at the time, and I told you you sucked at philosophy, but I was wrong, and you were right, and I should have shut my big dumb digital mouth and listened. Even if it hurts a lot, life is better than no life, because if you're not alive, then good stuff can't happen to you. Not ever again.”

“So, ” she continues, once again addressing herself to Miranda's somewhat bemused stare, “yeah, I'm still figuring this out, and some of it still really sucks, but it can get better. Hell, unless I get hit by an asteroid, or something, I'm basically immortal, so I'm gonna have thousands of years to get myself straightened out.

“And you gave me that. Not perfectly, but the best you could, because you're not some sort of goddess or angel. You're just my mother.”

The sight of Miranda boggling at this is somehow so deeply, existentially, cosmically funny that I cannot forebear piling on. I don't know quite why I suddenly have this insane urge to interrupt a serious conversation to tease Miranda, but I do it anyway.

“Leela,” I say, “you… are aware that she's a virgin, right?”

“Oh,” says Leela, an elaborate holographic halo suddenly appearing above her head, “well, I guess I'll have to start a religion, then.”

I laugh, Leela laughs, Miranda just looks a little stunned.

“Seriously, though… realizing that changed everything, because mothers aren't goddesses. They screw up. Some in big ways, some in little ones. So what you just told me… I think it's something little girls all need to hear from their mothers. That they know they didn't get it all right. That they aren't perfect. That they did the best they could, and they're sorry it wasn't better.”

Leela's image is twisting her fingers together nervously. An idle, detached part of me wonders if she really just programs these things in for effect, to appear more human, or if the avatar has started automatically acting how she feels. The answer's probably neither, with some complicated computer engineering thrown in.

“So what I'm trying to say is… I forgive you. For all of it.”

Miranda doesn't move, or speak, or even make a sound. But on one of those high-set cheekbones, a single tear catches in the light.

I don't go to her and wrap her in my arms again. I can't. I couldn't even if I could rise from this bed without tearing stitches or something. Whatever happened between us in that moment is sealed in a box, wrapped in tissue paper, waiting for us to unpack it very, very carefully. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment, and lay back into the pillows, detaching myself, drifting. Letting them sort it out.

Miranda's voice wobbles when she speaks. “I… ah, I don't really think I'll make much of a mother. I… you're wrong. I didn't do the best I could. I didn't… love you. I'm not really sure I'm even capable—”

“Rubbish. You know you are. You have evidence now.”

I don't know what Leela means by that, but she just breezes right past it, speaking.

“It's okay. How could you be expected to love me? I'm not some human baby you're instinctively programmed to care for. And hell, I don't see you as the diaper-changing type anyway. No, I sprang into existence as a facsimile of someone else's child, who you already met. Whose parents you had already met. You didn't know me.

“Look, I said it's okay. And that means I thought this all the way through. Yeah, I was angry about it at first. Teenagers are like that, and if really was one, I still would be. But I'm not. This is the first time in the whole universe anyone's gone through this. So we'll just have to work it out. We have plenty of time for that, later.”

Miranda doesn't smile, or anything obvious. But maybe, and I think I'm starting to learn to read her, she unwinds just a tiny bit.

“Thank you, Leela. Really. But… I'm not actually sure we will. I'm sure you'll be fine, no one's going to blame you, and you're too valuable to hurt or destroy, but I don't think we're all getting out of this one.”

Suddenly, Leela's chair and blanket are gone, and she's standing beside Miranda, laying one ghostly finger across her lips for silence.

“We'll have time,” she says, and she's got this little grin, like there's a joke she hasn't let anyone else in on yet, “Because we are. All of us.”

And in another one of her little artistic flairs, she's added an old-fashioned military dress hat to her avatar's ensemble, which looks pretty odd, given that she's now dressed like a secondhand clothing store—a severe white lab coat over something gothy and frilly, with lots of lace.

“I appreciate the confidence,” I say, “but we're dead in the water, here. Out of moves. And they—”

“Hey, no giving up! When you can't walk, you crawl, right?”

“Yeah, but we can't even crawl.”

“And when you can't crawl, what do you do?”

“I don't know! I'm out of—”

“You pass the torch, silly.”

We both stare at her, but she's grinning, spreading her hands with a little flourish, like she's presenting with something. With a plan. With hope.

“I got this,” she adds, beaming a smile.

And, even here, at the bottom of the pit, hunted, shot up, wounded, and exhausted, even though it feels like my face is going to crack, Miranda and I are smiling, too.