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Sensations come in waves, ebbing and flowing, lapping at the edges of his consciousness. The air is sterile and he unglues his tongue from the roof of his mouth with effort.
“Ugh.” It’s always the first thing he says upon waking. It’s his forty-second time doing so, 420 years since leaving Lunar Base and there are so many centuries to go.
“Good morning, Henry.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “Morning, Joey. Good to see you as always.”
There is nothing to see, but old habits die hard.
Henry is roused from deep sleep one day every hundred years to check on the ship. He rotates with nine other engineers, the ship set to wake them out of schedule only if a level three incident were detected. Otherwise, he sleeps, dreamless and static, until his pod opens and he inhales stale air.
“Did you dream this time?”
Another quirk of the lips. “You know I don’t.”
“Pity. I’ve certainly been dreaming of you.”
“Oh, so machines dream of ship operation engineers?”
Joey’s laugh sounds so genuine it tightens around Henry like a noose.
“I always look forward to when you’re awake.”
Henry can finally sit up without feeling lightheaded. “The other engineers that boring?”
That laugh again. “You are merely the most talkative.”
The side of the pod lowers at the touch of a button and Henry swings his legs over the edge. He always hates this part.
“Oh. Is that all?”
It took several “days” for them to get to this flirtatious stalemate. He stands with a groan, imagining eyes that couldn’t possibly exist watching his tense muscles relax. His military-honed body is kept in shape by strategically-placed stimulation pads. He aches to be on land again where he can run until his body is exhausted by actual exercise.
“Fit as a fiddle as always.”
Henry had gotten over his nudity in three “days.” It made little sense to try and cover himself when it was only the ship’s AI “looking” on. He showers, luxuriating in the rare heat. Joey plays something calm and it mingles nicely with the fall of water. He steps out and dries himself roughly, putting on a pair of coveralls with enough pockets to fit his cadre of maintenance tools.
The Jackdaw is a first-class transport ship. It is massive and top of the line, requiring little maintenance unless something catastrophic happens. Another ship had been ripped to shreds in a stellar storm seventeen “days” earlier and Henry’s throat always closes up as he reads the news logs for happenings in the sector while he had been asleep. He imagines his body in deep space amidst the wreckage. Would whatever made him him even be aware of the difference between death and deep sleep?
“You’re thinking again,” Joey prods.
“I always am.”
“You know what I mean.”
Henry looks at a spot on the wall and smiles. “I do.” He clicks the last log shut and leans back in his chair. “Nothing too traumatic, thankfully.”
“That’s good.”
“Hmm. Well, let’s get to it. I only have all day.”
Joey is a constant presence all around him. He runs diagnostics when asked and answers any questions Henry has. Henry fills out the paperwork dutifully although actual paper had been taken out of the equation “days” earlier. He misses holding pens and everything else technology has rendered obsolete.
“You miss it. Earth.”
“It’s where my family is. Was.”
“Your mother, father, and brothers?”
Henry swallows. “Looking at my personnel file again?”
“Perhaps.” Henry knows what is coming next. “And your fiancée?”
He swallows again, clenching his eyes shut so tight they burn. “It was a long time ago.”
“In the rebellion on Luna in 2524.”
Henry grits his teeth. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
Could machines even be sorry?
“We had just lost the baby and she wasn’t well after that and, well, I didn’t have to worry about her either anymore, did I?”
He lapses into a long silence, tapping information into the tablet too hard but it relieves the tension tightening his muscles.
“Henry. Are you upset with me?”
“I’m upset you can’t differentiate between what is and isn’t proper conversation.”
“Oh. Is that all?”
Henry drops the tablet on a nearby workbench and runs a hand through his curls. “Do you know why I’m here, Joey? Does it say that in my bloody file?”
There is a long pause as though the AI is reading through said file.
“I couldn’t take it after the rebellion. It was either be discharged from the Force or come here.”
“And the Force-“
“Was all I fucking had after everything went to shit on Luna!” His heart hammers in his chest and his throat and at the wrist of the hand clutching his hair.
“Do you know who I’m based on, Henry?”
“What?”
“AIs are developed from once-alive humans. I was based on a musician named Joey. He was rendered braindead following a mugging in Manchester, England. His parents were offered money to allow his mind to be mapped before he was taken off life support.”
Henry’s hand drops away, slapping his thigh with a hollow sound. “They let you know about that?”
“Yes.”
“God.”
“Hmm.”
“I guess we both have our bad pasts.”
“I’m a program, Henry. I have no real attachment to the man I’m based on. I have his memories, yes, but his vocabulary and neural pathways were more important.” There is a shrug in his tone. “Shall we continue, Henry? Time is slipping away.”
Henry knows Joey is his only friend here. They’ve only dug into each other’s pasts in the last few “days” and it’s creating cracks in Henry’s vision of the future. They are centuries away from reaching Serdos 7 and while he thinks he’ll take up a security position once there as he did on Luna, he isn’t sure that appeals any longer. He scrubs a hand over his face and gets on with his tasks.
As the “day” wears on, their relationship swings back into something more amicable. Joey has a way of making things light, injecting humor into a situation that often feels balanced on a sheer cliff overlooking an abyss.
“What was he like, the original Joey?”
“A bit of a mess, to be honest. He played several instruments and lived with his friend, Madeleine. They were in a band together. He was beaten because he was gay.”
The wrench Henry is using to adjust a neutrino stream in the primary engine smacks hard into the casing surrounding the bright light.
“Does that bother you, Henry? His being gay?”
“No. No, not at all. That’s fucking awful.”
“Indeed.”
Henry repositions the wrench and works it around until the stream flares and dims. “Do you know if they ever found who did it?”
“I do not.”
Henry shoulders the wrench and goes up the catwalk to the second engine. “When was he alive?”
“He died in 2017.”
“He died nearly a thousand years ago?”
“Yes. It took a few centuries for me to even begin to speak in a way that humans can understand.”
Henry realizes he knows very little about how artificial intelligences function apart from how they fit into a ship’s overall system.
“He was loyal and aimed to please.” Joey gives a very human sigh. “I wonder what it was like back then.”
“We certainly wouldn’t have been this far from Earth.”
“Hmm.”
Henry descends the catwalk. “I did some bartending when I was younger, before the Force. Maybe he would have played at my pub.”
“It’s possible. Are you attracted to him, Henry?”
Henry shrugs as he lifts the wrench and fits it around the release nut on another neutrino stream. “I’m just curious about who you are.”
“I’m not Joey, Henry. I’m... hmm. Joey.”
Henry huffs and does his work, glad to be putting his muscles to use. “There.” The ship’s engines hum, glowing softly as the door seals shut behind Henry.
He has lunch in silence, thinking nothing of it. For the first dozen “days,” Joey had only said what was necessary. The problem is, Henry’s memory is fragmented into these singular days separated by a century that are chained together by dreamless sleep he doesn’t experience.
“I’m sorry about earlier, Henry. It wasn’t right of me to peruse your personnel file and use the information found therein.”
“Aren’t all machines curious?” Henry feeds his trash into the recycler and stands.
“I don’t know any other machines of my caliber, Henry.”
“Well, it’s okay, regardless. My question was rhetorical anyway. It’s understandable to want to know about the people you... work with.” His lunch settles heavy in his stomach.
“Would you like to hear some of his music?”
A door whooshes open, Henry steps through, and the door whooshes shut. “It still exists?”
“A few songs do.”
“Sure. The only music I can remember listening to is the instrumentals you play when I shower.”
There’s the hammering rush of a guitar and then a voice, strong and sweet as that of a songbird, bewitches him.
Henry passes through a maze of corridors and into a cathedral-massive hall lined floor to ceiling with sleep pods. He can feel the life here, all of its suspended energy humming in his head. He imagines every last inch of the space torn to pieces and spewed across interstellar space.
When Joey speaks again, it’s so soft Henry can imagine his lips against his ear. “He never even thought this was possible. He’d look up at the night sky and wonder what it would be like to travel far away but this kind of travel was only written about in books.”
Henry read some of them when he was younger, when he had a slow shift at the pub. He had marveled at how optimistic people were a millennium before. Now, he was hurtling forward in skips and starts, each day-per-century adding more confusion.
“Keep moving, Henry.” The intimacy in Joey’s voice is gone.
Another song starts, this one sounding as if it had been recorded live. “Hmm. I’m looking over this file’s metadata and it was created the night he was attacked.”
A door whooshes open, Henry steps through, a door whooshes shut.
“It’s like he knew,” Henry muses.
“It is.”
“Fuck.”
The man’s voice is an ache, a scar that itches until it’s scratched into a wound again, bleeding all over the damn place. The song ends with cut off applause. It pulls the wire keeping Henry taut and then lets him go completely. He catches himself against a wall.
“Henry?”
“I’m fine, love.” He bites his tongue.
Joey says nothing for a very long time.
Henry gets his legs under him and continues down another maze of passages and catwalks, cutting through maintenance tunnels. He keeps the Jackdaw humming in his own small way. The minutes tick into hours and his time awake is coming to an end once more.
“What’s it like, being asleep?”
“I’ve forgotten. I’m only ever aware of being awake. I mean, the next time I’ll be aware of anything is when I see you again.” There’s no eye for Henry to look into. Joey is omnipresent yet invisible. He has a presence yet is nowhere that Henry can see. “Are you like this with any of the other engineers?” Like Joey, they are ever present yet unseen, but unlike Joey, they leave evidence everywhere. He passed their pods on his way to the showers.
“No, Henry. Only you.”
“And you’re not sick of me?”
“No.”
That’s something, isn’t it? He isn’t completely alone in this potential mausoleum slipping through space in a reality that was once an optimistic dream. Henry can no longer dream. They are suppressed by drugs, his body fed by tubes and his muscles kept strong via electrical stimulation. But Joey is real. Henry knows the absurdity in that but it’s his truth. He wishes he could dwell on that as he sleeps, that dreams weren’t ripped away. He strips out of his coveralls and showers again, letting the water beat across his nape. Henry hums and Joey watches him pass the other engineers in their pods. Henry stares at the wall for a long moment.
“Will you tag these songs, Joey? I want to hear them again when I wake up.”
“Of course, darling.”
It washes over Henry like warm, welcomed rain.
“Good night, Joey.”
“Good night, Henry.”
The pod door slides shut and he takes three deep breaths as the needles are reinserted and the electrical stimulation rumbles through him like atmospheric reentry.
His pod door opens. There is a sweetness in the air and the usual boring hum is filled with the sweet music of a long dead but not forgotten songbird.
“Good morning, Henry.”
He unglues his tongue from the roof of his mouth and takes a deep breath. “Mmm. Good morning, love.”