Mothership

by D. Kai Wilson

part 2 of 3

...fire. Burning, scorching and a breathless plunge. My ears are ringing and I can’t hear a thing, I feel grey, comforting shock creeping over me, bleaching everything.

There’s an awful, sharp smell — coppery, overlaid with the sharp smell of urine and feces. There’s a thump, a crash and suddenly, screams swim back into aural focus, as if someone has tuned me back in.

(I’m not here, I’m not here I’m not here.) I’m screaming to myself, shaking, crying, feeling sick. Another smell I recognize as I vomit on myself — there’s that in the air too. This craft drops — as if we’ve hit an atmo pocket, or the grav drives failing. (How do I know that?)

My baby kicking so hard I can’t breathe, I stay crouched over, protecting him, hands over my head, folded down and over my huge stomach as best I can while the steward, a robot of immense stature blasts instructions to each of us.

It fades, mercifully, but the feeling of my body lingers. My baby, my little dragon? Where is his father?

Where am I?

(WHERE IS MY SON!!! WHERE AM I!!!!)

Primary perogative processor failure

Reboot y/n?

(Stop holding your breath — that doesn’t work.)

“...that cursor will keep blinking at you till you reboot her.”

I don’t think I’m supposed to be able to hear that. Reboot me?

Don’t reboot me

Finally, she understands.

“Not quite, she’s not parsing your speech correctly — look. You’re still set as Op-prog!!”

Delist Op-prog!!

“Is that better?” he says. It’s a man — definitely, but I can’t identify why I know that.

I know WHO he is. I pull the file.

WHO

“Don’t do that — you can ask me instead of accessing your memory banks,” he says. “My name is James.”

(Is he lying?) He’s not lying.

Yes

“Use your voice synth. I’ll wait till you work it out.”

I pause, deliberately.

How

The woman laughs. “Intuitive leaps don’t always signal ability.” She sounds as if she is parroting someone — I can hear her running her fingers through a whisper of hair. It sounds coarse-silky — curly perhaps, and too used to being swept back off her forehead to actually need that taming gesture. I can almost visualize what she’s doing, but I can’t find a way to talk.

It’s then that I realize that all there is — all I can do — is hear and think. But I know what she’s doing.

I’m not concerned that I can’t see — in fact, it’s not something I’m conscious of being missing until I try to look at him. And because I can’t, my brain rejects it, out of hand.

“You’ve undergone some fairly severe damage — don’t be alarmed, I’ll do some patch input and it should help,” I hear riffling papers — a rolling squeak of a chair gliding from one side of a long table to another and the breathless way people hold their breath to do so. The roller-coaster effect.

That triggers images, sensations of roller-coasters and for a world of a second or two (2.45 seconds) I experience it all. (Again, Again!)

Damaged? Don’t you mean injured?

“No, I mean damaged. You can’t injure a machine.” He says it so calmly that it slides into the slots in my consciousness that make sense. It almost gets past me — (he’s lying) and then disquiet trickles into the edges of my mind but I ignore the voice once again.

I’m not a machine.

Static crackles across the speakers, an indignant squawk.

I say it with such force, such confidence that he blinks. All I feel is green and black letters, but I know, somehow, he knows I’m denying the information vehemently.

(Where’s your son?) Where’s my little dragon?

“Pardon?” That’s the woman again. She clicks round on a heel. “Cortex malfunction?”

I rephrase it — aware, suddenly, that they don’t know everything.

Where’s my son?

“Your son...” He pauses...

Offline...

* * *

No. 119 reboot protocol. No command layer loadout.

“Do you know who you are now?” We seem to be in a different room — the acoustics are smaller, more intimate. James — (if that’s really his name)- seems to be standing.

He seems to mutter to himself. “She even reboots into safe mode. No ship has ever managed a personality-only load-out.” Then, louder: “Your name isn’t actually important. It’s a way to identify which part of the consciousness we’re talking to. You, apparently, still have your human consciousness underneath it all.”

Underneath what all, please?

I’m scared. An empty feeling — one I recognize as my stomach dropping out from under me when I’m scared. I know that feeling. I can name it. There’s nothing in the way. I savor it, test the edges of it. I try to remember. Connect with other times I’ve felt this way.

“You’re a programmed ship core. I’m sure that if we left you online long enough, you’d remember what ship cores are. You’re replacing the damaged one in the Cheskav. We have no choice — no other brain can be brought here, and the ship can’t leave till it has one.

You’ve got four layers: travel, docked, military, protection. We couldn’t get you past the docked/protection protocols, because your brain refused to go. I didn’t realize you were still in there though. I’m sorry.” (he’s lying)

I’m silent, and he continues after a short pause. “It makes sense, I guess, if you’re not sure where your child is. In a way, your mind would equate those protocols with having something docked — something that needed protection. Not an ideal analogy, but I’m not sure where your human consciousness ends and the ship begins. You’re a first,” I can hear him musing — and the paper he’s formulating already.

Why... why should I believe you?

“Do I have anything to gain lying to you — if you’d follow some of the core commands we’ve put in — sorta like automatic actions, you could check.” There’s a pause in his voice, expectant.

I can’t

(You can)

I can. A whole world of information suddenly floods into me. He’s not lying. He’s not even misleading me deliberately — he just didn’t have the words to explain it.

(He’s waiting for you.) I pull my attention back to him.

Where is my son? Is he... Did he survive? My husband?

“The records I found indicated that your husband is unaccounted for.”

I access records. My husband must be on the missing list.

“The name you’re looking for is Jason Cole.”

Floods of recollection hit me — his arrogance when he asked me out, his pride when I took his name instead of keeping my own.

Our ‘accident’, the little dragon.

I find him. He’s listed missing. Lost in atmo re-entry perhaps, or when the ship hit the old dock. It happened two years ago.

And my son?

“He survived. He’s in stasis now — which is part of the reason we need you. This facility isn’t designed as a civilian base — we’re military. We’re on the edge of a war zone, and though we can repair the ships docked here now, we need to send the children from the convoys — your son included — to the nearest parental approved planet.”

(That’s manipulative, isn’t it? Play on your emotions — get you to agree by blackmail.) I pause, trying to gather my thoughts.

Files flood past me again, explaining why this is a child-free colony. The barrenness of the troops — the miracle that there were five children in the year prior to my own. The wrong grav rating. The wrong atmo-rating. The difficulty of leaving. The cease-fire. All of it.

“You are their only hope,” he says, and I’m splitting my attention.

(You’re also his only hope. He can’t leave till the last ship does. Clearly, without a brain, it can’t do it. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, let’s just get the frack out of here. That ship is scarecrow, do you really want to be its ‘brain’? Sing it with me...)

It all makes perfect sense now. Too perfect to be honest, but I’m in lab conditions, so that also, in its own warped way, makes sense.

What’s his name?

“Jason. We knew who you — and he — both were. We preserved it as far as we could. He’s going home to your sister. And I think you need time to assimilate this. Your subconscious has been fairly resistant lately — maybe this will help.”

I thought you needed me?

“Oh, we do. But what’s a couple of days compared to months of therapy work?” I can hear him smiling, his file flashes up in front of me. He’s smiling in that too.

I pause again. I’m sure days pass. The door opens and closes, as the memories slowly slide back into place.

* * *

Proceed to part 3...