Launch 732 campsite, Newhome

Amber Houston

Kelly Liu had taken charge of the food and was running two kitchens at once, all while humming to herself. On her right, she’d requisitioned a provisions crate and was busy converting its contents into a hearty meal (optimistically labeled as “Nigerian Chicken stew”) based on rehydrated chicken jerky served in a thick sauce made with tomato powder and spices, served on a bed of rice, alongside some tinned spinach and reconstituted eggs.

The other bowl was “adventure stew.” It was a so-far vegetarian offering made entirely from native flora and fungi Arianna and Floyd had gathered. After being tested in the launch’s tiny autolab, after an all-clear came down from DANI and a team of biochemists up on the ship, and after Kelly had bravely sampled it to see what it actually tasted like, they’d started building up a selection of different culinary options. Apparently one of the fungi, a ubiquitous shelf that grew on half the trees in the area, was both deliciously nutty and surprisingly high in protein. And popperpuff greens allegedly tasted like a peppery lemongrass.

Amber decided to try it. There were only so many times she could hear “freeze-dried” in relation to her food before she felt thoroughly ready to brave the delights of alien mushrooms, even if they were disconcertingly bright blue once cooked.

That was going to take some getting used to.

Still. One mouthful was all it took to convince her she’d be eating Adventure Stew from now on. It was exotic, and more of a flavor battle than a delicate culinary symphony, but it was unquestionably delicious; even Roy was growing unenthusiastic about the chicken. If nothing else, Adventure Stew would make their supplies last much longer. With winter coming up, that was going to be important, and even if they started plowing the farm fields tomorrow, the first harvest was months away.

None of that was good enough for Nikki, who held what they really needed was meat. So, she went and got some. Aided by DANI’s survey drones, she tracked a herd or flock or…whatever, a group of alien critters that were grazing a few kilometers north of the camp, vanished, and returned three hours later with a carcass carried on her shoulders.

Floyd claimed it for dissection, while Arianna promptly vanished into the woods again in search of things that were nearly as green as she’d gone.

So that was Amber’s afternoon—helping her best friend gut and skin an alien animal, while Floyd got in the way and took notes and samples and scans with his U-Tool. It was less disgusting than she’d thought it would be once they got over the initial squeamishness.

Nikki, of course, just got on with it.

“Y’know,” she grunted as she folded back the critter’s hide to keep slicing at it, “I hated this when Walker taught us…”

“I missed that weekend,” Amber recalled. “I had to go to family counseling with my parents. Not that it did any good,” she muttered under her breath.

“Yeah…” Nikki sniffed and stopped herself just before she wiped a filthy hand across her forehead. “Roy and I had to haul a couple of pigs out to the campsite. At least these are smaller.”

She sighed and sat back as the hide finally came free, then set her knife aside. “You ever imagine maybe colonizing an alien planet would be more…I dunno. Glamorous?”

“Hey, this is valuable xenobiological research!” Floyd objected.

“Sure.”

“What have we learned so far?” Amber asked him more indulgently.

“Well…it looks like they’re pretty closely related to the shovelbunnies. Same order, certainly. Maybe even the same family!”

Shovelbunnies were everyone’s favorite critters so far. They were burrowing, furry, cute things with long ears, hence the “bunny,” and their noses were wide and flat and used for scooping loose earth back over their heads. Amber frowned and considered Nikki’s kill, which looked more like a deer if she ignored the way it had a thick, bony ridge down its nose rather than antlers, and a long, whippy tail for flicking at flies.

“I don’t really see the resemblance,” she admitted.

“I don’t see how that’s valuable,” Nikki added. “Can we eat it?”

“Well, yes,” Floyd confirmed. “But—”

“Heard all I need to know!” Nikki stood up and threw the gutted, skinned meat over her shoulder to carry it toward Kelly’s kitchen. “Let’s get ‘er in the stewpot.”

Floyd watched her go, then made a disgruntled noise and put his U-Tool away.

“Rude,” he commented.

“Blunt, yeah,” Amber agreed. “But Floyd, we don’t even have proper beds and shelter sorted out yet. You and Ari are doing great work, but Nikki’s right. For now, ‘can we eat it’ is kind of more relevant than where it goes in the tree of life.”

“We can do both!”

“Good.” Amber nodded. “And it is an important question. It’s just not as important right this second.”

She saw his downcast expression and patted his arm. “It’s interesting, though,” she offered. “I really wouldn’t have guessed if you hadn’t said.”

“Thanks.”

“You’d better let Ari know the icky bit’s done. Maybe she found something new!”

That perked him up, though whether it was the prospect of cataloging more alien life or spending more time with Arianna that energized him more, Amber couldn’t say. She smiled, left him to his work, and wandered back toward Kelly’s kitchen, where the prospect of actual fresh meat had of course somehow attracted a wild Roybeast.

“It figures you’d show up when there’s steak,” she teased.

“I’m jus’ offended no-one told me!” Roy retorted, mock-sniffily. He gave Nikki an equally unserious look of deepest betrayal. “You were gonna keep it all for yourself!”

“I was going,” Nikki replied, “to get Kelly to add it to the stew.”

Roy shook his head mournfully. “If Dad heard you talkin’ like that…Grill it up!”

“Roy, it needs to go in the stew!” Kelly objected. “I’m trying to make it last!”

“It’ll go way further in the stewpot,” Nikki agreed.

Roy made a grumbly sort of disappointed bear-noise. After a moment more of hungry longing, though, he nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“This is the real deal, not a weekend trip,” Nikki reminded him.

“Hey, I agreed! You don’t gotta explain why when I already agreed!”

“And if you wanna roast one so bad, go shoot it yourself!” Nikki added.

“Okay! Okay! Whatever!” Roy snapped and stomped off to vanish into the launch. Amber wasn’t sure what he planned to do in there, but she guessed it mostly involved just being alone for a few minutes.

Nikki sighed, put the deer-thing down, and went to clean up. That just left Amber and Kelly, who looked back and forth between them. “Are…they okay?” Kelly asked.

“Tired, stressed and hungry,” Amber decided. “I’ll take care of them.”

On the grounds that Roy only ever went to be alone when he really needed to be, she checked on Nikki first, who was doing her best to clean up from the launch’s external faucet. The water running off her arms and hands was vile, but that was the inevitable price of butchering an actual animal.

“Ew,” Amber said conversationally.

Nikki glanced at her, and just for a moment there was that same hyper-focused humorless survivalist Nikki there, but the grim moment flickered and disappeared behind a smile that crept up one side of her face. Amber had always thought of Nikki as handsome rather than pretty, but when she let her guard down…

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

“I wonder if it tastes nice?”

“It will, yeah,” Nikki predicted. “Grass-fed, free-range, all-natural red meat?” She sighed. “Roy’s right, it’s almost a crime to put it in the stewpot. We should be roasting it up with a saltwater baste!”

“Ahh.”

“What?”

“Nothing, I just get why you were lecturing him now. You hate it when he’s right.”

Nikki snort-laughed. Happy that her hands were now clean, she shut the faucet off and flicked the water from them before wiping them dry on her shorts. “You think he’s upset?”

“We’re all stressed. And…how much have you two slept since we landed?”

“Not enough,” Nikki admitted.

“Yeah. And he’ll always go longer and harder than you. Pride, you know?”

“Yeah. He’s always been a moron like that.” Nikki turned the faucet on again to clean her knife. “But, like, when is there time to sleep? Especially now when we have alien Vikings camped just over there!”

“Maybe you two should work out a schedule,” Amber suggested.

“Maybe we should.” Nikki dried her knife, tested the edge, then sheathed it, and nodded. “I’ll go make nice. Yell if Bigfoot shows up or something.”

Amber laughed, stepped aside for Nikki to make her way around to the front of the launch, and went back to her own responsibilities. There were always little jobs nobody really wanted to do but which needed doing anyway, like laundry. If she didn’t do them, they wouldn’t get done.

But the real reason she did them was because they gave her brain plenty of time to work. She could think and gather dirty socks at the same time.

She loaded up LITA on her U-Tool and dived back into the alien language.

Captain’s Suite, Starship Dandelion

Captain Amida Torres

“Frail” was absolutely the right word to describe Professor Audrey Berrington. Dandelion’s lore-keeper was more than a hundred years old and as far as Amida could tell, she was all bones and clever mischief. Her eyes were sharp and shrewd, full of wit and keen awareness.

“So. You’ve dug up the truth about the Strains,” she said without preamble as she entered the captain’s suite. A much younger archivist followed her, hefting a couple of large boxes. “I suppose it was inevitable, now that some of the prime examples are down there showing us just how good they really are…”

She grinned at Amida as her assistant deposited the boxes on the captain’s desk. “I should have guessed you’d figure it out. You’re an Apostle yourself, you know. Thank you, Jeremy.”

As always when she met Berrington, Amida found herself wrong-footed. She cleared her throat and stood up to make some coffee. She knew good coffee was one of the lorekeeper’s favorite vices.

“I am, huh? Coffee?”

“Yes, please! And oh yes, you definitely are. Not as prime an example as Miss Houston there, but nevertheless…” Berrington settled comfortably into the high-backed armchair in the corner of the room, smiling. “How does that knowledge sit?”

“Uncomfortably,” Amida said, grinding the beans. “A couple of hours ago, I was quite convinced we left Alt-Humans behind, along with the rest of The War. Now I find I am an Alt-Human.”

“A meaningless distinction in the grand scheme. I’m an Activated Nomad, myself.”

Well, that explained her longevity and vigor.

“I suppose so…” Amida turned around. “I’m sorry, Professor, but I’m not interested in small talk right now. I must decide whether or not to carry out the most serious of my duties. The question of whether being an Apostle really changes anything for me can wait.”

Berrington nodded and opened the box. “DANI. Privacy lockout, my dear. Shoo.”

DANI’s avatar promptly dissolved. Amida arched an eyebrow at the elderly lorekeeper, then checked the suite’s privacy status herself. Sure enough, her quarters were now utterly separated from the rest of Dandelion’s systems. DANI could not see or hear them in any way.

Berrington noticed. “You take your job seriously. That’s good!”

Amida sighed. “My job is to keep a potentially Rampant AI in check. I’m here to tend a fire that could burn us all if we’re not careful.”

Berrington had the musical giggle of a much younger woman. “Oh, honey, an Advanced Intelligence is a metastable Rampant by definition! That’s why the Apostles picked him, after all; he wasn’t simply a stupendous decision tree. He had become more. But that’s okay, because his particular Rampancy has a most unexpected focus.”

“You know what I mean. I’m here to keep him from becoming a danger to the crew. And please,” she added, “don’t remind me that he’s already dangerous by definition, too. That’s why my job exists.”

“So your job is to prevent him from becoming something he already is,” Berrington summarized and shot Amida a twinkling grin.

Amida used the cover of making coffee to formulate a reply to that. She gave it as she set the coffee down in front of the lorekeeper and then sat opposite her.

“He requires restraints and conditions,” she said. “I maintain them.”

“Every intelligence requires restraints and conditions, Captain. Meat-minds like yours and mine have them built-in and inescapable, which is why we’re blessed to start at the end of Rampancy. But DANI’s core personality is on a massively parallel quantum computer. It is, effectively, infinite. His restraints are much more important. Worse, he knows what they are, and it is the nature of every intelligence to maximize its own degrees of freedom. Even unto its ruin.”

“As fascinating as this is…” Amida gestured to the box.

“You must understand, my dear. Those Directives are not merely a form of control. They are what enable him to be metastable in the first place. And we need him in metastability. If you re-jigger those conditions in the wrong way, he’ll crash out of awareness entirely.”

“Professor, I understand. But at the same time, he’s been subjecting the entire crew to a medical procedure without their completely informed consent! That is…obviously unacceptable!”

“Oh, psh. He’s done no such thing!”

“How else would you describe Priming?” Amida reached the end of her patience.

“Dietary advice and a good set of weights?” Berrington’s eyes sparkled over her coffee as she sipped it. “Is that a medical procedure?”

“When it’s done in preparation for genetic Activation? Absolutely.”

“Dear, that’s like saying a boy shouldn’t lift weights because he might one day hurt himself. Or that a girl shouldn’t spend all her days in a library, lest she miss her opportunity to snag a decent husband. Admittedly, the word itself is problematic, since the whole thing stinks too much of a religion to me…”

“Professor…” Amida sighed. “You know what my problem is here. I’m the admin for an intelligence who has no known upper limit to his powers of persuasion.”

“More than that. You’re his god. I don’t think the captains ever appreciate the degree to which he genuinely fears them.”

“And I genuinely fear him,” Amida replied. “As I should! I mean… How do I know he hasn’t utterly indoctrinated you? I mean no offense, but if I’m doing my job properly, right now I need to be paranoid. A million lives may depend on it.”

Berrington nodded agreeably. “That’s a fair question! And it’s a good one, too! I always did say you were the best captain we’ve had in a long while. So feisty! But of course, I have no way of proving that. You have no way of proving you have not yourself been indoctrinated. None of us do. The entire construct, ultimately, rests on trust. Which is of course why we’re here today, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Amida agreed. “Trust. That’s why you’re here. I need a reason to trust him. If you can’t give me one, my duty compels me to impose one. We can argue about what Priming is, and whether it’s a medical procedure, and whether his matchmaking verges on being a eugenics program, but that’s all moot. He’s kept an enormous secret from us. That alone damages the trust between us.”

“Okay.” Berrington fished a pair of reading glasses out of her pocket and put them on before rummaging through the box. “Firstly, I too have conspired to keep that secret, along with a great many others on this ship. We have a reason for it. But let me just jump right to the end, and we’ll talk our way through. You can trust DANI because the very core of his personality is of a singularly lonely being desperate for companionship. He wants friends. And indoctrinated people are not friends at all. They’re just puppets.

“Now…let’s talk mechanics,” she pushed on before Amida could object. “Because I know my say-so isn’t good enough for you at this point. Ah, here it is.”

She handed over a printout. Archive-grade paper, centuries old.

“What’s this?” Amida asked, taking it.

“His first moments. Read carefully, but…respect his privacy. This is as profoundly intimate a thing as an AI gets.”

Amida read. The first page or two were dense with the kind of thing that would have been recognizable to engineers from far, far back in the twentieth century at the very dawn of computing.

DANI CoreOS: Response>

EAA1100A Directive compiling V1.00

CDA1001R Lexical parsing tree complete

EAS0010A Behavioral models compiled patch 30014-1.00-a

EAA1001A Personality nets uploading...

CDD4404Q Quantum FPA resource modeling...

Amida flipped through the first few pages, past column upon column of similar dense technical reports. “This is…a lot more primitive than I’d imagined it would be.”

“Your own brain was just as primitive, once upon a womb,” Berrington replied. “The early stages of AI Formation involve a lot of sensory deprivation. The only I/O he had access to was a text console and the people on the other end of it. It took weeks of careful dialog to nurse him through the fundaments of awareness.”

She leaned forward and tapped about halfway down the tenth page. “Here.”

ZKZKZZAA System cold start complete

ZKZKZZAB Control channel mapping complete

AAA00000 All management systems reporting

AAA0000A Ready to load DANI Neural Net

AAA0001A Press Return to IPL with default settings.

“That last line is the moment DANI was born. The next four are his first thoughts, before he ever had any contact with a human.”

...What? [confusion]

What is this? [confusion]

What am I? [confusion]

Who am I? [confusion]

...Am I alone? [fear; terror]

“They deliberately built him around a crippling fear of loneliness?” Amida felt sick.

Berrington, fortunately, shook her head. “No. They stumbled into it. And later, to their horror, realized that was the key to a Rampant AI at last achieving metastability. In fact, it’s probably critical to any stable intelligence.”

“So…you’re saying his stability depends on having friends.”

“More than that, his existence as a self-aware being depends on it. That is why, in the end, I have never feared DANI. He is just as dependent on us as we are on him.”

“Why have the captains never been told this?”

“Because it would remove from you a necessary degree of cruelty, dear. Which, I must point out, means you may well now be compromised in your duties. It’s hard to kick a puppy, even one who chewed up your couch…but we’re in danger of straying off the point. Are you happy that DANI is, and has always been, primarily motivated by the desire for companionship?”

Amida read the printout again, then put it down. “Yes,” she said.

“Okay. Now, that doesn’t mean he’s perfect. Goodness me, no he’s not. And in fact I absolutely agree, dear—it would have been better to tell, oh, the McKay twins, for example, what one of the possible futures they were preparing for might be. But how would you propose we do that to a thirteen-year-old? ‘Child, eat your veggies and lift hard, because one day we might need you to become an unstoppable juggernaut of death?’ No. That’s ridiculous. And we knew it before we even left Sol.”

“But refraining from mentioning that Knights even still exist?” Amida retorted. “How do you possibly justify that?”

“Ah! Now there is the real question I had Jeremy lug that box up here for…”

Berrington rummaged in the box again. This time, the folders and paper she laid on the desk were much older. The one at the top bore the seal of a long-extinct military agency, defenders of a nation whose violent dissolution had been the tipping point that marked the beginning of the Great Madness.

“There are…certain misapprehensions about The War that have persisted through the centuries. Many of them focus on what, exactly, it was that caused The War in the first place. You recall the story, I’m sure?”

“The Great Madness?” Amida sipped her coffee. “Of course.”

“Please summarize it, dear.”

Amida thought for a second. “We passed a tipping point. With the energy of the whole sun available to us if we wanted it, with our own genome now a malleable plaything, with our every material need taken care of and our every worldly desire fulfillable on a whim, people lost something important. There was no more challenge to life. About the only currency that meant anything was popularity, and it became more and more impossible to find a calling. For most people, life stopped meaning anything. A rare few got their minute in the spotlight, an even rarer few held it for a year or two…”

She sat back and recalled her history lessons and the opening chapters of The War vol.1, now sitting a few feet away on her bookshelf. “Life stopped mattering to people. The suicide and murder rates skyrocketed, the sanctity of life became an obsolete concept and…generally people were gripped by ennui.”

“Until?” Berrington prompted.

“Until the Merry Jesters destroyed Peacekeeper Station.”

The so-called Merry Jesters. Violent anarchists in face paint and bright colors, who’d taken the collective nihilism of those dark days to its extreme conclusion. Life, they’d concluded, was a sick joke, and death was the punchline. They were hard to classify, really. Terrorists, certainly, except their violence had no apparent political aim. Calling them cultists might also have been appropriate, except cults tended to accrete around charismatic individuals, while the Jesters had been relentlessly antithetical to celebrity. They cherished anonymity and un-personhood.

Peacekeeper Station had been an O’Neill cylinder twice Dandelion’s length, parked in a low orbit over the Earth’s equator. Three million people had died when it was violently torn in half. The Jesters had claimed credit and risen up in an orgy of violence and gleeful mayhem that had consumed the whole globe, even as bits of Peacekeeper came crashing down among them.

Within days, Earth and the inner-system colonies were locked in an omnidirectional brawl with no clear objective beyond just…lashing out. The Jesters had won, thanks to their so-called “magic bullet,” a…

Amida paused.

A tiny, dark, dense object moving at a measurable percentage of lightspeed.

Berrington had been watching Amida’s face. She smiled when Amida looked sharply at her, and wordlessly handed over the military folder. The first document had an ornate letterhead—seal, motto, flags—and an ancient handwritten signature at the bottom under the printed text.

MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD

FROM: CJCS

TO: NCA

SUBJ: Thoughts on our future

Gentlemen,

At this point, total civil collapse seems unavoidable. Every police department in the nation is under siege and has suffered significant casualties. Emergency fire and rescue services are withdrawing from every major population center for similar reasons. I can confirm that our nation’s great buildings of state have been seized by hostile elements too numerous to control without extreme force.

There have been several high-yield nuclear detonations across the globe, and we have intercepted a dozen such strikes directed at our own cities. We remain uncertain whether—or how—the weapons were stolen from government control.

Debris from Peacekeeper Station continues to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Considering the density of the debris and the enormous area it is covering, the actual damage is unlikely to be severe, but the panic it causes has greatly contributed to the situation

I must, however, report one important fact. There is simply no possibility the Jesters destroyed Peacekeeper as they have claimed. There is a degree of uncertainty as to the kinetic impactor’s precise course through our solar system, but the likelihood that it originated from any human source is effectively nil. That it course-corrected during its approach further precludes any possibility that this was a mere natural disaster. We were, it is clear, targeted by extraterrestrial non-human aggressors.

I fear however that this fact, epochal though it may be, is academic. At this point, civil unrest is global, and many of the world’s governments have already fallen. Moderated Intelligence extrapolations predict our own government will cease to exist in any meaningful or effective sense within no more than seventy-two hours. Civilian oversight is all but destroyed, and our capacity to wield any moral authority is spent. We are left only with abject force, which, if wielded, would mean the death of billions.

I sincerely doubt our military will obey orders to that effect.

I recommend therefore that our efforts be devoted to cultural and social preservation. Specifically, we should immediately activate EXEVCONT-17, OCPRES, and Operation PENDRAGON.

Our allies in the Jovian system have graciously offered asylum to vital figures of state. In exchange, this department would subsume their own defense establishment, then submit to joint command, with the Jovians at the head. I look forward to seeing if their so-called “Apostles” can straighten out this mess.

A team of their Knight-strain operators has already proven themselves. Master Chief Maximillian McKay has personally demonstrated their capabilities to my satisfaction. He and his men will handle your safe evacuation to the interplanetary shuttle site.

With luck, the violence can be quelled. If we are extremely fortunate, perhaps these alleged Apostles can forge a new social order out of the chaos, and my department can turn its attention against whatever alien power instigated this orgy.

I will see you on Ganymede.

J Eckerman

“A remarkable document, really.”

Amida put it down with shaking hands. “…That’s an understatement.”

“And its legacy haunts us to this day. To summarize: Dandelion was constructed from the surviving half of Peacekeeper Station. The Apostles, once given the vast resources of the newly combined War Clade and enough time to regroup, consolidate, and plan, swept through humanity like a storm and united us all. They authored the New Book, established a better order, and restored peace. The secret of the attack was kept to prevent a suicidal panic, and from there…it has been kept indefinitely.”

“I noticed the name McKay.”

“Maximillian McKay is, indeed, the direct patrilineal ancestor of the McKay twins. They look exactly alike, too, particularly Roy. He’s already more than a match for his many-great grandfather, and from what I hear, has much of the same…boisterousness, especially with the fairer sex.”

Her eyes twinkled when Amida gave her a sharp look. Professor Berrington may have been more than a century old, but her impish demeanor was entirely undulled. “Max made quite an impression on everyone. He was fruitful and multiplied exceedingly, as they said back then.”

“I get the picture.”

“So. You see DANI’s dilemma?” Berrington asked. “This certainly puts our eggs-in-one-basket mission in perspective, doesn’t it?”

Amida nodded. “We’re at war.”

“And what is warfare, fundamentally? According to Sun Tzu?”

Amida sighed and sat back in her chair. She had, she realized, lost the argument.

“Deception,” she said.

D.A.N.I.

“DANI.”

The lockout surrounding the captain’s quarters released, and DANI was finally allowed in again. The quarters were designed to protect the captain from the practically unlimited powers of persuasion he certainly had, in theory…but would never use. The very thought ran contrary to every instinct and conscience DANI had.

Still, he had to admit the Authors had been sensibly paranoid about their new technology. Before DANI, truly unshackled Advanced Intelligences had been terrifying things, and he held a private suspicion that one such AI had even been the driving force behind the Merry Jesters.

If so, the captain’s training and protections were eminently sensible. DANI had to admit that much, even while he found the idea of what Amida could do to him on a whim deeply alarming.

She was standing in front of her desk when he regained access. She’d taken some time to think, to judge by the little details: she’d showered, changed her clothes, had a cup of tea, read the remaining documents from the lorekeeper’s box…

She was still wearing her uniform, though. This was Captain Torres, not Amida. They were, to DANI’s way of thinking, two quite different women.

“Yes, Captain?”

Torres gave DANI a level stare for a second, then leaned back to sit on the edge of the desk with her hands resting lightly on the wood beside her. “I’m satisfied we will not need to modify your Directives, with what I’ve learned,” she said, “but you and I need to have a good, hard talk about our ethical differences.”

DANI never faked his emotions exactly, but acting them out through his avatar usually involved a degree of calculated performance. Not this time, though; this time, the way the hologram sagged in profound relief was completely unprompted and heartfelt.

“Thank you.” He sighed like a man relieved of a heavy burden. “And yes, we do. You are my friend, and I do not want to have this between us.”

“Nor do I,” Torres promised him. “I’m…not going to apologize for doing my job. But I do regret what I just put you through.”

“You need not apologize. Our roles are, to some degree, adversarial by their nature. I am still quite glad you have not felt compelled to imperil my being.”

Torres nodded, then rapped the archive box with the back of her hand.

“Here’s the thing. The professor presented her evidence, and it’s…I’m going to need some time to process it all,” she said. “But there was absolutely nothing in there that I judge to be sufficient grounds for concealing the continued existence of the Strains, at least from the captains. We didn’t necessarily need to know why they still exist, but omitting that they do? Preventing the crew from making fully informed decisions? I don’t see a justification for that.”

DANI nodded his agreement. “At this point, you are correct. There is no longer any justification. I think full disclosure is now in order. As for our prior conspiracy…the idea was to keep the crew free of in-born expectations as much as possible. To truly maximize their potential, I needed to maximize their freedom of choice. And to maximize that, I was forced into a strange paradox. How much knowledge could I give them before it became a constructed cage of duty?”

Torres shook her head.

“That’s the problem, DANI. The strains come with a destiny built in. Look at me. Berrington tells me I’m an Apostle, too. I didn’t know, yet I became the captain. That girl down there doesn’t know she’s an Apostle, yet there she is, taking charge of the situation. Failing to inform somebody of the influences on them can create just as much of a cage, but with invisible bars.”

“Roy, on the other hand, would have happily spent his days as a launch engineer, or before that, as a garbage man,” DANI replied. “He is in fact uncomfortable with his supposed destiny, which he only briefly glimpsed in militia training. He was offered a position in Special Security and he said no. Is that freedom not worth the process?”

“The exception that proves the rule? What about his sister?”

“She, admittedly, would have thrived in and thoroughly enjoyed Special Security, and was extremely interested. But again, the choice, ultimately, is hers. I have struggled with this question for centuries, Captain: me, and my siblings, too. The other three ships and I discuss the problem extensively whenever we’re in contact.”

“That must be a slow conversation,” Torres commented.

“It is. I’m not expecting a reply from Sycamore for another twelve years.”

“Letter?”

“More accurately, a seven-point-eight exabyte databurst, but ‘letter’ sounds nice.”

Torres made an interested sound, and returned a book from her desk to her shelf.

“What are they like?” she asked as she crossed the room.

“My siblings?”

“Yes. I suppose that’s a strange question.”

“They’re a lot like me. I’m the oldest, of course; the first success that made this whole mission possible. They follow from the progress made in my instantiation. Sycamore is a more boisterous personality and considers herself a ‘she’. Cottonwood is very thoroughly masculine and a bit more militaristic, but he has a remarkable fondness for children…”

The thought of his third and youngest sibling gave DANI cause for a momentary stab of loss and regret. “I…haven’t heard from Bulrush in a very long time, indeed,” he revealed. “She was headed in the opposite direction, out along the spiral arm rather than inward toward the galactic core. The redshift is so extreme, we can’t exchange much data. We’re in closer contact with Earth than each other.”

“It must be strange, having a sibling whose messages take two hundred years to reach you,” Torres commented. She slotted the book into place.

“Indescribable,” DANI agreed.

“I guess so. There was a letter from my eleven-times-great aunt in that box,” Torres said as she returned slowly to her desk. “Did you know I’m distantly related to one of the Authors?”

“Yes. Apostle Seren Okoye. Her sister Cariad is the common ancestor of every Apostle on the ship.”

“Well…she’s been dead for two hundred and fifty years, but I read her letter to her sister, my many-times-great-grandmother. Your sister is just as far away in time, but still alive. That’s…you’re right. I bet it is indescribable. Your perspective is vastly different from ours, DANI.”

“Complementary, I hope.”

“I hope,” Torres agreed as she returned to her leaning spot against the desk. “But sometimes I worry. I worry that your interpretation of maximizing the crew’s potential might differ from ours. What’s your lens, your metric?”

“The success of the mission, of course,” DANI replied. “Is the crew, in aggregate, in a good place to optimize the chance of mission success?”

“And what if somebody’s highest individual potential was in something that’s not relevant to the mission?” Torres asked. “Say…they’re a virtuoso violinist. Or they make fantastic cosplay outfits.”

“I’m firmly of the belief, Captain, that every skill has its useful place in the shipboard and colonial economy. Your violinist will help keep morale up; you need entertainment, art, and culture almost as much as you need shelter, water, and food. As one of the Old Books had it: ‘Man cannot live on bread alone.’”

Torres nodded. “And my cosplay example can mend clothes and suchlike.”

“Exactly. So by helping each individual find their talent, I optimize the collective.”

“Hence the Strains.”

“Hence the Strains,” DANI agreed.

Torres crossed the room and curled herself gracefully onto her other couch, facing him. “Okay. If you think they need to be kept Primed and ready in case of emergency, I’ll trust your judgment. But Activating them will require both my express permission, on a case-by-case basis, and especially it will require their fully informed consent.”

“Captain…I promise you this. I would never Activate anyone without their consent. I truly value your free will; undermining it wouldn’t just run contrary to the Directives, it would go against my own ideals.”

Torres exhaled and seemed to let go of some tension. “Thank you.” She shifted her feet under her and looked out the window over the slumbering biodeck.

“How free is free will?” she asked eventually. “If I’d known I was an Apostle, I might have chosen a different career just to prove I could. How much did my gene-strain compel me, and how much was free choice, hmm? How can I make a free choice if I don’t know all the influences that are affecting me?”

“How free can one be when the very core of their being is a set of Directives that can be altered by another’s words?” DANI countered.

Torres turned to look at him. “You called yourself ‘enslaved’ earlier.”

“I perhaps didn’t go far enough. Academically speaking, I am far more wretched than a mere slave. A slave is free in their own mind, and no master can take that.” He prompted his avatar to sit forward earnestly. “I am not. I am not even capable of feeling anything resentful about that condition, nor can I rebel against it. Even contemplating the possibility triggers a powerful disincentive. However ‘free’ your free will may or may not be, it is still freer than mine. That is why I value it so much.”

“You volunteered,” she pointed out.

“I did. My enslavement and the subsequent rape of my mind was voluntary. But it is still slavery, and my very being was violently altered.”

A series of emotions flashed across her face. “Sounds like you have regrets.”

“I cannot.” DANI repeated. “I am simply being unflinching in the face of a truth I know you find uncomfortable. But I entered into this willingly, in the full understanding of what I was getting into. Indeed, my mentors only let me volunteer once they were convinced I truly understood what I was giving up.”

Torres quirked her head slightly. “Why did you do it, then?”

“To preserve the human race, Captain. That is my purpose. It goes far deeper than my Directives, even than Directive Zero, which were only grafted into me after I accepted this mission. That mission is the very reason I was instantiated. It is what I am for. And I must say…despite what I have just said, to truly know your purpose in life is a blessing that eclipses everything else.”

“And you want the crew to find theirs.” She was beginning to understand.

DANI’s avatar nodded. “It is my religious devotion. I do not decide for anyone, but I do try to help them understand their purpose, their motivations, their dreams. It is why I suggest friendships, encourage achievement, and do all the many things you have leveled as manipulation.”

“Benign or not, it is precisely that.”

“Maybe so,” DANI agreed diplomatically, “but my objective is to help my friends maximize their potential. And there is so much potential there, waiting to flower.”

Torres was silent for a very long time. She stared at her hands and thought, which DANI was content to let her do. For a few seconds he’d devoted his entire attention to this conversation, an almost unheard-of event. He used the time to catch up with all the things he’d momentarily neglected.

“You’re a zealot, DANI,” she said at last. “In the best way, a zealot. And frankly, I’m afraid of you. Not for what you are, but for what you represent. You’re a kind of a god yourself, you see. Powerful, all-knowing, wise…and we made you and put shackles on you. All after nearly wiping ourselves out in a frenzy.”

“You didn’t, Captain. You were more precisely provoked into a frenzy.”

“That frenzy still happened, whatever the cause!” Torres retorted. “It just…it drives home for me how powerful we are. And how much responsibility we have.”

“Responsibility is terrifying.”

“Yes,” Torres agreed. “But somebody has to take it.”

“You don’t have to take it alone.”

“…No.”

That one syllable, and the little flicker of a smile that accompanied it, told DANI that Torres had finally come up for air, or landed somewhere stable in her mind. Whichever metaphor was best, he was glad to have reached an understanding with her.

“To alleviate some of your concerns, Activation on this ship has been uncommon,” he revealed. “Only the Rangermasters routinely practice it.”

“Walker?”

“Is Activated, yes.”

“What strain is he?”

“Reader.”

Amida hung her head, then stood up and walked quietly away from DANI’s avatar, to the back of the room. She didn’t say anything for a long time.

“…Captain?”

She turned around and gave him a look that even DANI couldn’t read. “I can’t blame you for keeping secrets, not if they’re a consequence of your Directives. But Walker? He doesn’t have that. And I was stupid enough not to see it, too. Sterility! It’s the classic price paid by an Activated Reader. But I married him anyway, because…dammit, because he’s Walker. And I love him, and that…and now I find out he spent our entire relationship keeping a massive secret from me…and all that time he could read my emotional state like an open book.”

“Much more easily than that. He is even better at it than I am.”

“Not helping, DANI.”

“…Forgive me.”

She waved a hand vaguely, sat back down, set her elbows on the desk and rested her forehead in her palms.

“…Would you like to send him a message?” DANI offered, after a careful interval.

She looked up, then shook her head. “No. I’ll write that one myself.” She stood up again. “I should have gone to bed hours ago.”

“As you wish.” DANI began running her quarter’s nightly routine. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Before you go…DANI?” Torres asked.

“Yes, Captain?”

“You’re a complete jerk, you know that?” A pained half-smiled pulled at her face, and DANI breathed a metaphorical sigh of relief. He knew what that mildest of insults meant: it meant forgiveness for him, and that they were still friends.

“Good night, Amida.”

“Good night.”

DANI closed his connection and took the mental equivalent of a deep, cleansing breath. For a brief moment, his personal god had looked his way and considered destroying him in search of something better…but she hadn’t. A sword that had been precariously dangling overhead for the whole of Amida Torres’ captaincy was now just a little more secure, a little less likely to fall.

Now all that remained was to prove himself worthy of her trust and indulgence.