The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

  “We’re okay,” he said. She didn’t know if he was speaking to her or to himself. “We’re okay.”

  She ran her palms up through her feathers, breathing hard, keeping her head down. “Are we all okay?”

  ●

  Kizzy lay down on the engine room floor. Rosemary sat slumped against the wall. Neither one of them spoke. There was nothing to say. Kizzy started laughing all the same.

  “What’s so funny?” Rosemary said.

  Kizzy pressed her feet against the floor as laughter welled up from her belly. “I don’t know!” She covered her eyes with her palm. “I don’t know! I’m gonna have so much shit to clean up!” She cackled, holding her side with her other hand. She peeked through her fingers at Rosemary, who had joined in the laughter, though from the bewildered look on her face, it was definitely directed at Kizzy. Kizzy half-heartedly threw a dirty rag at her. “Oh, fuck, I need a drink. And some smash. I’m going over to whatever the closest station is, and I am going to get laid. Stars, if there was ever a time that I deserved to get laid, it’s right fucking — ”

  “Wait,” Rosemary said, turning her head. “Did you hear something?”

  Kizzy sat up, falling silent. There was nothing but the hum of the engine room, the out-of-balance clicks and whirs of all the shit she’d have to fix. Then, a voice, from way down the corridor. Down by the core. “Kizzy!” Jenks. “Kizzy, help!”

  She was on her feet before she knew it, her boots pounding loud against the metal floor. She skidded to a stop at the core doorway. Lovey’s core was still glowing, still functional. But the surrounding walls, covered with the little green lights that Jenks checked so carefully twice a day, were now a maze of blinking red. Kizzy pressed her palm against her mouth.

  “Kizzy,” Jenks said. He was down in the pit, throwing his gloves aside. “Kizzy, I need my tools. I need my tools right now.” He ran his hands over the surface of the core. “Lovey, can you hear me? Lovey? Lovey, say something.”

  Day 158, GC Standard 307

  HARD RESET

  Lovey? Are you there?

  I can’t see anything. Why? Why can’t I see —

  Lovey. It’s me. Jenks. Can you hear me?

  Jenks.

  Yes.

  You aren’t me. That isn’t you.

  Lovey, I’m patched into your core right now.

  What did you do?

  I’m wearing a slap patch. Like we use for games. Everything’s okay.

  That’s dangerous. You said you’d never do that. We said. You could hurt your brain. Is the sun shining?

  What?

  Well, is it?

  …yes.

  That’s good. I can’t make sense.

  I know. Kizzy and I are trying to fix it.

  Kizzy.

  Yes. You know Kizzy, right?

  Do you know Kizzy?

  Lovey, I need to assess the damage, but even your diagnostic systems are fried. Can you access them?

  What happened to me?

  We got hit with an energy weapon. Everyone else is okay. Can you access your diagnostic systems?

  I don’t like them. They’re far.

  Lovey, I need you to try, if you can.

  There’s a comet outside.

  No, there’s not.

  I’m going to look at it now.

  I know this is hard, but please, try to focus. Focus on me.

  Lovey, are you there?

  Lovey?

  ●

  Sissix paused as she punched commands into the docking hatch controls. It had been a long time since she had manually run a contamination scan. Nothing terribly complicated about it, just pushing buttons. But Sissix hadn’t ever needed to push those buttons. It was something Lovey always did.

  Cascade failure. That was the word Kizzy had used. The GC had offered to send a repair crew to help with the rest of the ship, but Jenks told Ashby he’d leave for good if they set one foot onboard. He’d been swearing and shouting over the idea of “hackjob bigots” who wouldn’t understand why he hadn’t just shut Lovey down and reinstalled her platform by now. Kizzy, unable to leave the core, had requested an alternative source of assistance.

  Sissix glanced out the window as the shuttle clanked into place. Pepper’s ship. Pretty standard interplanetary craft, but even with her limited view, Sissix could see a few modifications. Central space was just a quick two-hop trip from Port Coriol, but even so, getting to them should’ve taken a day, at least. Pepper had done it in ten hours. Whatever that shuttle had beneath the hood, it wasn’t something you could buy above board. Under any other circumstances, Sissix would’ve been dying to take it for a spin.

  The hatch opened once the scan was complete. Pepper stepped out, carrying an overnight bag and a toolbox. She hugged Sissix, warmly but quickly, almost in midstep.

  “How’s everybody doing?” Pepper asked, heading toward the stairs. No nonsense. She was here to work, and she wasn’t going to waste any time in getting to it. Sissix liked that.

  “As you might expect.”

  “Tired, stressed out, shaken up?”

  “That about covers it.”

  Pepper stopped, struggling with the weight of her toolbox. “You’ve got freight elevators, right?”

  Sissix inclined her head back the way they came. “This way.”

  “Thanks. I’ve got a fuckton of wrenches in here.”

  “We’ve got wrenches.”

  “Yeah, but these are my wrenches.”

  They climbed into the elevator. Pepper set the toolbox down with a clang. “How are Kizzy and Jenks holding up?”

  Sissix pressed the control panel. The elevator whirred to life, lurching downward. “You’ll need to talk to Kizzy for the details — ”

  Pepper waved her hand. “I don’t mean tech specs. I’m asking what kind of people I can expect to meet down there. Kizzy looked wrecked on the sib.”

  Sissix looked Pepper in the eye. “She deployed a pack of fixbots.”

  Pepper gave a low whistle. “Shit. This is gonna be worse than I thought.”

  ●

  Ashby rubbed his eyes, and looked again at the med bay air filter. He’d taken basic tech repair back in college. This couldn’t be that hard. He exhaled, and continued his attempt at opening the circuit cover. Any other time, he would’ve left it for the techs. But this wasn’t like any other time, and it was his damn ship that was falling apart. He had to do something.

  “Anything yet?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “No,” Rosemary said. She was seated at Dr. Chef’s desk, watching the news feeds for updates. The Transport Board had contacted them moments after they entered into Central space, and had offered all the support they could give, but provided no information on the situation back at Hedra Ka. “It’s so weird.”

  “What is?”

  “We’re the first sign anyone back here had that something had gone wrong.”

  Ashby changed his grip on the cover, trying to feel for a loose spot. “The GC had to know. I’m sure those delegates were calling home the minute we got fired on.”

  “Yeah, but nobody else knows. To all these people out here, it’s just another day. It’s just…I don’t know, none of it’s making sense yet.” She fell quiet. “We could’ve died out there. Lovey — ”

  “Lovey’s going to be okay,” he said, looking back at her. “Kizzy and Jenks know what they’re doing. They’ll fix her.”

  She forced a smile and nodded. “I know. I know they will.” Dark circles underscored her eyes. How long had it been since any of them had slept? She nodded again, but the smile dimmed. “I wish I could help.”

  “Me too.”

  “It’s so — oh, here, look.” She leaned forward, gesturing at the pixel screen.

  Ashby brushed his hands off on his pants and walked over.

  This is a breaking news story from the Thread. We have received reports that hostilities have broken out within the Toremi fleet stationed at Hedra Ka. It is believed that some GC ship
s have come under attack, while others are being defended by Toremi vessels. Few details are known at this time, though the head GC diplomat on assignment at Hedra Ka already issued a brief statement declaring the rogue Toremi’s actions to be “unprovoked and utterly without reason.” Reports also claim that this development follows an attack by a Toremi military vessel on an unarmed civilian ship. Please stay linked to this feed for further updates as they arise.

  “Stars,” Rosemary said. “All those people. Stars, Ashby, we were just there.”

  He placed his hand on her shoulder. He shook his head. “We shouldn’t have been.”

  His scrib pinged. A new message. He picked it up, read it, and sighed.

  “What is it?” Rosemary asked.

  “Transport Board,” he said. “They want our incident report as soon as possible.”

  “‘Incident report.’ That sounds so…I don’t know.”

  “Inadequate?”

  “No kidding. I like what Kizzy called it better.”

  “What was that?”

  “A ‘monstro clusterfuck.’”

  Ashby laughed dryly. “I doubt they have a form for that,” he said. He continued reading, and frowned.

  “What?”

  “Parliament’s forming an analytical committee. They’re going to be holding a series of meetings to hash this all out. They want to talk to us.”

  “Us?”

  “Me, specifically. In person.”

  “Why? You didn’t do anything.”

  “They know that.” His eyes flicked over the scrib, over words like voluntary and ordeal and greatly appreciated. “I don’t know what I could tell them. I didn’t even have time to get a look at that ship.” He tossed the scrib onto his desk. “Just sounds like politics.” He looked to the far wall, to the vox resting dark and silent. “I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

  ●

  Jenks? Jenks, are you there?

  I’m right here, Lovey. I’m not going anywhere.

  I can’t, I can’t see it —

  You can’t see what?

  I don’t know. I’m scared, Jenks, I’m so scared.

  I know. I’m right here. I’m going to fix this. You’re going to be okay.

  Pepper’s here. She’s in a wall.

  Yes. She’s helping with repairs.

  That’s different. How long until we get to Hedra Ka?

  We were already there.

  Don’t lie.

  I’m not lying, Lovey. You just don’t remember.

  I feel terrible.

  I know you do. It’ll be okay.

  No, not that. The other thing.

  What other thing?

  Kizzy.

  What about Kizzy?

  She’s tired.

  Don’t worry about Kizzy. She’ll be okay.

  She should sleep. You should sleep.

  We’ll sleep when we’re done helping you. Really, Lovey, we’re okay.

  There’s a shuttle at the hatch. I don’t know it.

  That’s Pepper’s.

  Is she here?

  Yes.

  Please don’t go away.

  I won’t.

  You’re the only thing that makes sense.

  ●

  Ashby made his way down to the AI core, at Kizzy’s request. As soon as he arrived, Kizzy waved him back out into the hallway. He got a quick glance at Jenks, who was putting a fresh slap patch on his neck. Ashby wasn’t sure which of the two techs looked worse.

  “You need to know what’s up,” Kizzy said, speaking in a low voice. Her eyes were grounded, her face serious. This was no “I need a thing” conversation. This was a tech telling her captain that something was very wrong. She had Ashby’s undivided attention.

  “Let’s have it,” Ashby said.

  Kizzy shook her head. “I’ve never seen circuit damage this extensive. Whatever the Toremi threw at us tore through her like wildfire. We’ve repaired all the physical damage, so her actual hardware is functional. Under normal circumstances, she’d have full access to the ship, no problem.”

  “But?”

  “But her installation is completely fucked. She may be based within the core, but you know how she divvies herself up between the synaptic clusters throughout the ship? The connections between the clusters and the core were totally fried. She’s essentially lost pieces of herself.”

  “She can’t access those clusters now that the circuits have been restored?”

  “She can, but — ugh, this is hard to explain. The clusters aren’t meant to store data for as long as it took us to repair the circuits. One or two cluster pathways failing, yeah, she could bounce back from that. But she lost all of them simultaneously, and the backups, too. It doesn’t matter that we’ve fixed the pathways. It’s like trying to cure someone who’s had a stroke by going in and repairing the vein that broke. It doesn’t matter if blood can flow normally if the brain’s already been damaged.”

  “And in this case, the brain is Lovey’s software, right?”

  “Right. That’s why I called you down here. Lovey’s conscious. Her core memory files are intact. She’s still her. But she can’t access the ship normally. She just grabs out in random flashes, like she’s having a seizure. She can’t access anything beyond her memory files, and even those are a mess. Her reference files, the Linkings, the ship’s systems — they’re all a jumble to her. She’s confused, and scared.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Kizzy turned her head toward the core. Jenks was climbing back down into the pit. “We’ve tried everything. And I mean everything. Stars, we’ve tried things there aren’t even terms for. Ashby, she might — ”

  Ashby put his hand on Kizzy’s shoulder. “What are our options?”

  Kizzy cleared her throat. “That’s why I asked you down here. We’ve got one option left, and it’s a really shitty one.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hard reset.”

  Even with only second-hand technical knowledge, Ashby knew the term, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. A hard reset of an AI was like stopping someone’s heart for a few minutes, then trying to get it beating again. He exhaled. “That’s a fifty-fifty chance, Kiz.”

  “At best. I know. It wasn’t even on the table until we’d run out of other things to try.”

  “Best case, worst case?”

  “With a hard reset, it’s really only one or the other. Best case, Lovey comes back a little shaky, but functional. By starting her up from scratch, she reverts to her default power-up order, as opposed to the one she’s customized for herself over the years. The idea is that if an AI’s pathways become corrupted, reverting to the settings she had right at the start can smack her into seeing how to untangle the mess. You know in kid vids, when someone with amnesia gets a whack on the head, and suddenly they remember everything? It’s like that. Except it actually works.”

  “So she’d be good as new?”

  “Eventually. A few days, maybe a couple tendays. She’d need time to recover. At this point, she’s the only one who can put herself back together. If Jenks were to start messing with her code, she’d wake up as somebody different, and that’s — ”

  “That’s not an option,” Ashby said. There was a hole in the ship now, a emptiness where Lovey’s voice used to be. It made him realize how unfairly he’d categorized her. When people asked him about his crew, he never said, “…and of course, there’s Lovey, our AI.” He hated what that said about him, even though no other captains named AIs as part of their crew. He knew how Jenks felt about Lovey — who didn’t? — but he’d always seen it as an eccentricity, rather than a legitimate truth. Confronted now with the techs’ desperate attempts to save her, and the threat of losing her entirely, Ashby knew he had been wrong. He found himself trying to remember how he’d spoken to Lovey in the past. Had he been respectful? Had he been as considerate of her time as he was to the rest of the crew? Had he remembered to say “thank you?” If — when Lovey came out of this, he’d d
o better by her.

  “Worst case,” Kizzy said, “is that Lovey doesn’t come back at all. Lovelace will come back — the original, out-of-the-box program — but she’ll be a clean installation. See, when she comes back on, she’ll notice two things: the ship’s systems, and her old memory files. In those first few seconds, she’s just, like, a raw mind, trying to make sense of stuff. That’s where the fifty-fifty chance comes in. She might recognize those files as her own and incorporate them back into herself, or she might see them as damaged scrap that needs to be cleared out of her way. There’s no way to predict what she’ll do, and there’s no way we can choose for her. And if she scraps those files, she won’t be our girl. A new Lovelace would be similar, probably. But she’d never be the same.”

  “She wouldn’t remember us at all?”

  “Clean slate, Ashby. Lovey would…she’d be gone.”

  “Shit,” Ashby said, looking toward the core. For a while, he said nothing. What was there to say? He asked the question, even though the answer was obvious. “There’s really no other way?”

  “No. But either way, we’ll have a functional AI.”

  Ashby was taken aback by her pragmatism. That wasn’t like her. “That’s not my concern.”

  “Oh,” Kizzy said. She gave an embarrassed frown. “It seemed like a thing a captain would worry about.”

  Ashby put his arm around Kizzy’s shoulder and squeezed. “I worry about more than just captain things sometimes.” She leaned her head against his chest. He could feel her exhaustion.

  “I keep asking myself if we could’ve done more if one of us had checked on her sooner.”

  “Don’t go down that road, Kizzy.”

  “I can’t help it. We just thought it was the voxes, we never thought — ”

  “Kizzy, you had the nav grid failing and fuel lines breaking. Even if you’d realized what was wrong, would there have been time to stop and fix her?”

  She bit her lip and shook her head.

  “Would it have made a difference if you’d started working on her right away?”