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It’d been eighteen days since Sunder split, with only the recurring beeps of the shuttle’s console keeping Rho aware that time was passing. Normally, between 6 and 10 Trager Space Time, the bustle of the other two onboard would keep her from slumping over her desk like this, but that would've been hours ago. The last time she was able to rest proper must have been more than 16 hours ago, she thinks. Even then, it wouldn't be long before one of the grown men of the ship needed babysat.
She sits up for a moment, scrunching her eyes shut. With the mini workstation propped up in her quarters, she fidgets with the seat and opens up a new instance of SenderNet. Maybe something new to tide her by, she hopes, but that hope is on a thread so thin it could be a nanowire. First thing on MegaMag: Brebulan pop star Toka Smoka's new set of quintuplets in some second extra-marital affair. A plague starting on some remote part of Brebula after its lava caps froze.
How riveting. It's not long before she finds the one that confirms her suspicions— reports from nearby planets suggest scavenger ships are surrounding Sunder and looting the scraps of the ships, the buildings, the bodies.
Her stomach churns. Though Dendritus hadn't been her home for a long time, especially after the Rainbow Sanctuary, the pain tugged at her with the same pangs of guilt that had been on her back for days now.
It's not my fault, she repeats this mantra. This was going to happen no matter what I did. It was an indicator of the pre-existing disturbance. The MysTech reacted to the disturbance, it did not cause anything. Satellites do not cause dust storms, gas monitors do not cause volcanoes, and MysTech does not cause spatial disturbances. It's not—
As she stares at the blurry video feed, ships approach the wreckage of freighter ships, desiccated buildings, glass, metal, torn clothes, a ship sticks out to her. Some media outlet, the logo familiar to her, with a blue vortex held up by a Bipidri. She sits in a lecture hall, only maybe 9, watching her father lecture at a podium with the same symbol.
Her parents… where had they gone? Still on Dendritus? Back to Brebula? Maybe moved to Earth, to New New York, like they had always wanted? She wouldn’t know. If they called her, for the first time in the last 9 standards, she doubt she'd even recognize them. They made their choice, and she made hers.
Her eyes glazed over the article, detailing spacers of all planets and species swarming in on the planet. No doubt that the mass of sophisticated machines and mechanisms, patented under strict no photography, now for anyone to buy and sell in fragments on any underground market. Priced for fortunes maybe, but definitely for more than she's ever made in her lifetime. Further down, already murders have happened in the chase for parts, pirates stealing from one another, and those people were probably getting their parts sold, too. A sequence of images showing the rubble, including a small nozzle, decorated in deep rivulets and spirals. It looks just like the product of one of the few people she met while in the Rainbow Sanctuary.
Her heart aches deep. Her hands quiver over the mouse, bringing a hand to her mouth.
The door to her room has a firm, impatient knocking. She breathes heavy, looking at the monitor, when a second knocking rattles. She turns, sighing.
“Boots, it’s late.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he says, muffled. Rho presses the small button by her desk, quickly sliding the door away. She's looking up enough to see that underneath his arm is his LifeCursor, Fatima, cushioned by a heavy jacket.
“I just don’t know what else I can do. She won’t turn on," he says, adjusting the jacket with callused hands.
Rho scoots closer in her chair to get a closer look, accepting the chassis in her arms. “Did it come with a manual when you first got it?”
“Yeah, because the first thing I think to pack when escaping Sunder is to grab my 89-page-or-something-long LifeCursor manual,” he sneers. Rho glares at him. “Plus, I lost it, and there's one built into the system— I’m sure I could fix it if it was any other issue.”
Rho peered closely at the model, turning it in her hands with a slight pressure. “Okay, but it won’t be fixed tonight.”
“Figures,” Sly mutters, not particularly to her, shaking his head. "Take care, Doctor.”
The door clicks behind him as he exits. Rho looks back at the extremely expensive paperweight in her arms, then at the time on her mini alarm clock. Late, but not too late for a little project.
She lays the LifeCursor on the table, patting down her top. She looks around for her toolbox, pressing palms against several arrays of cabinets, before finding the screwdrivers and sufficing with the first one she grabs. She settles into her chair, readying the tool in hand.
As her hand grips the blue orb centered on the cursor, it starts to glow. Rho sits back. Boots was stupid, but was he stupid enough to not try and just wait a second?
“Password required,” it states, in a neutral voice, with no particular accent she could place from anywhere in the galaxy. Something like the ones she hears from interplanetary business moguls in Sender Station, but not quite there.
She glances at the time, the door, and then her desk. This seat was comfortable enough, and Sly’s quarters were at the other end of the shuttle. She could get up to a little late night password guessing.
She tapped her fingers in thought. A man rich enough to get a LifeCursor, too stupid to keep the physical manual in case the whole thing went kaput, and thinks his home planet started with a U. She furrows her brow, staring at the ball in the center of the LifeCursor chassis.
“Admin.”
The LifeCursor immediately lights up her desk, causing Rho to chuckle. Wait until Mr. Matavastros hears this.
“Hello, Dr. Bowman," a woman’s voice sounds from the device.
Rho blinked, hesitantly looking at the cursor. Though she had seen very few and heard even fewer, only from people on Sender or even some rich professors back on Dendritus had that accent. Cordician. Maybe this was the Seductive Susan all those kitschy magazines advertised, figures a guy like Boots would want something so cheesy. She then realizes that the AI is probably waiting for a response.
“…Hello there,” is all that she can think to say.
A holographic projection of a woman appears above the cursor, blinking up at her. The woman wears a short dress with leggings, tall boots, and overall plain look. Her medium-dark skin matches her eyes, which stood out doe-like from her high cheekbones and curved nose. There was something distinctly familiar about her face, maybe a model from a magazine, or some other superstar she didn't know? The familiarity was uncanny to herself, as was the level of detail in her face. Perfectly defined, extremely detailed, as if she was scanned in.
“Do you…” Rho felt silly. Programmable personalities weren’t people, they were algorithms, maybe excluding the RealAlive Personalized AI she'd heard about in the news she followed. Her colleagues back in the sanctuary would have an argument about this perceived sapience, of course (Turing Test fallibility this, Schwarz-Kinien's Question that), but…
"Can you run a diagnostics check, please?" Rho asked.
Now she was asking this thing with niceties. Way to go, Rho, you're contributing to the human flaw of humanizing anything that doesn't immediately try to kill you.
“That isn't necessary, Doctor. It's a check automatically done when I boot," the AI replies, holding one arm behind her back. She (it? she questions her own usage now) seems to fidget with her fingers, not looking her in the eye.
Rho leaned back in her chair. What kind of AI did this guy have?
“You have no kind of errors about power states, or excess static, or…”
“Nope.”
“…Nothing at all?”
“Nothing,” she kicks her foot around, mumbling, “bone-dry nothing.”
Rho tilts her head to look at the projected woman in front of her. This was one sophisticated AI, weirdly realistic for what she expected was something on PAL's level of "find a ball", "comfort child", or "bludgeon intruder". Not whatever this was. Must've been very expensive.
“In all honesty, Doctor, I wanted to talk to you,” she says. "My boss tends to not like when I initiate things instead, so I had to do a little bit of trickery to try and get to you. I'm sorry for the deception."
Rho sits, dumbfounded. Her boss? She guessed Boots was the only boss she could have, but it was such strange wording to use. She would've guessed owner, or, chaperone, maybe, but really anything but boss.
She looked down at her feet, glancing up at Rho. “I went to one of your book signings, before you were sent to that awful place. I really liked your book."
"Oh, thank you, that's very kind…" Rho smiled, but the realization seems to creep up on her. "Boots went to one of my book signings?"
"No, no, that was before I even met him, I think…" the woman doesn't look at her, just at her shoes. "It's not important, really, only that I… just was interested. I never saw something so easy to show to people, to get them to try and understand what's interesting about physics. It's easy for just anyone to pick up."
Now Rho realizes, she did recognize her. A woman, just like her, with blonde hair tied back, silver earrings, a voice just like hers passing a "thank you" while a crowd surrounded her table.
This wasn't just any sophisticated AI. It was a RealAlive AI. This was, or is, a very real woman. She blinks at the hologram at her fingertips, who was still not looking at her face.
“It helped me get a different view on life,” she said, interrupting Rho's silence. “It was a nice little distraction."
Rho felt her face burn with flattery. Klaz, she hadn’t had a reaction like that in standards.
“Thank you, um…” she realizes she did not know her name, or if she did, it was said by a man she didn't listen to anyway.
“Fatima,” she responds.
“Fatima… oh, so not Fatima?”
She groans. “No, not Fuhteemuh. I've told him how to pronounce my name so many times, and he always forgets, and now the cursor is programmed to the wrong one, and— I tell him every single time and he never—“ she groans, grimacing. “He never listens!”
“I’ve noticed,” Rho mumbles.
“It’s like he only kept me around for the secretary work, and now I'm dead, and I've got to do the exact same thing! It’s a miracle he didn’t just stick with Seductive Susan, but no. he wanted to keep me in this… box! To be his little secretary, forever!"
Rho frowned. “It’s hard for me to believe he got a custom personality just for secretary work.”
“I know. But he says I’m the only one smart enough to do it.” She sighs, slumping downward. “Not like I'd want peace in the after-cyberlife, or anything…”
Rho nods. This does seem needlessly cruel, even for Boots. She figured asking might make it worse.
"Is there any reason you wanted to pick up my book?" Rho asks, trying to get off topic.
Fatima perks up. "Yeah, I went and studied accounting, but it wasn't really what I wanted. Took me dying to realize I shouldn't have," She looks away. "I… I really like math, and I liked your book because it made it seem so easy to understand, to show people why physics is interesting."
This was a tale she'd heard from so many people her age, after she got her doctorate. And yet, the words made her face burn.
"That's what I was hoping for," Rho smiles. "Are you able to… download things?"
"Well, yeah, but it's all through SenderNet. I can't exactly pick and choose anything I want, if it's never been reported on, I can't view it."
This was deeply upsetting to Rho. Information only restricted to newsposts on Anachronox? Seems like a bummer.
"I've got a lot of books here, downloaded onto my ship. If you'd like, I can try and use the dataports in the cursor to give you them."
Though she doubted it truly happening, Fatima seemed to glow in incandescence.
"Really? I— I would really like that," she taps her fingers.
"Alright. Let me see here…" Rho browses through her files on her modem. A file full of her favorite physics, mathematics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, and a plethora of other books displayed before her.
"Are you able to see from there?" Rho asks, browsing each file.
"Yes, I can read the details from here…" she trails off. "These are fantastic. Where did you get these?"
"It can pay to be in academia sometimes. You get a lot of free access to otherwise extremely expensive books. It's nice to pass the time, if I ever get stuck like this."
"Jeez, I can't imagine what you're dealing with. You have to deal with my boss and some kooky old man in your home."
"I know, right? It's exhausting," Rho sighs, typing command lines to get a new folder made. "It's barely enough room for me to live out here this long, let alone me, two men, and a toy robot that runs over your toes."
"It feels like babysitting," she scoffs.
"I know!" Rho agrees, faltering on what to type. "What kinds of files can you read?"
"Anything but .xpdf should work," she says. Rho glances over to see Fatima on her toes, trying to peek over.
"Oh, let me," she holds onto the chassis and gently scoots it closer to the screen. "Better?"
"Yes, sorry, I forget that doesn't work anymore," she chuckles, reading the screen. "This is incredible. Thank you for doing this for me."
"It's nothing, I just want to have someone to talk about it with," Rho says. "Someone who's not Mr. Matavastros, I mean. I didn't have much, back on Sender."
"Yeesh, only Grumpos? What does he even talk about, how much he likes rubbing Mystech and not paying people?"
"No, tell me he's going to pay him," Rho sighs. She watches the last of the files transfer onto her Qik-ReSIEVE— she should've asked if that was compatible first, shouldn't she?
"Oh, believe me, if you saw what I did, you wouldn't trust him to pay anyone. He got a girl limbless and he still wouldn't pay her a cent!"
Rho frowns. "That's not good." She takes out the small piece of data storage from her computer, and swivels to face Fatima.
"It's deplorable!" she puts her arms in the air, "And it's not like he wasn't there to watch! I think he really has gotten stupid, probably from the booze."
Rho inserts the piece and immediately Fatima smiles.
"Oh, this is perfect, thank you," she sits down and seems to read something invisibly in her hands. She smiles, eyes sparkling.
"I can always find more, I could even reconfigure you to be able to read news outside of SenderNet, if you'd like," she says. It'd be a lot of work, to read the documentation, but…
"…You don't have to do that," Fatima says, looking up at her. She says that, but the wideness of her eyes, the quiver of her lips— the excitement was palpable.
"I can figure it out for you," she smiles.
Fatima looks back at the invisible text she reads, smiling big.
"That would be nice," she beams.