“You could’ve escaped whenever you wanted?” Robert’s eyes returned to that green he usually has. “Why? Why stay bound?”

“You would have killed me.” Bec used her free hands to peel the straps apart where they met on the back. They felt weird like they were magnetized more than adhering to each other. The moment that one side of the strap was pulled clear of the other side; they fell apart. Her finger went up to her head. “Blaow, right in my head.” Bec worked at her head strap. They were very thorough bindings, tying every part of her body to the chair in some way. Finally, Bec saw there was an apparatus that was binding her forehead to the headrest.

“Oh wow, you aren’t unraveling them. You actually made your profile bigger to make the straps looser. It’s like you knew about Mr. Yellow’s power before he tied you up. And apparently you knew about this gun.” Bec was surprised to see a quick draw mechanism in his billowing black garments. She did not know that was where he got his gun.

“You don’t seem surprised I escaped the binding. More interested in it.”

“You are an enigma. Bec, I have no idea why you’re here. I find you very interesting.”

“Does that mean you don’t have a room ready for me? Wait ‘til you see my toothbrush cup. Where’s my bag?”

“You weren’t brought in with a bag.”

“My phone?”

“Just the tablet.”

Bec ripped herself from the chair in time to fall to the floor in despair. “I need my bag. I need it so badly.”

“Well, that sucks. What kinds of goodies are you hiding there?”

“Everything.”

“Shoulda backed it up.”

Bec knew this. Bec knew this well. Why did she neglect to download all the stuff onto her Timelet? Why? “Uggh. I’m… I just suck, okay. I don’t know what I’m doing. Tell me about this Mountain’s Border. What are you doing, and can I find a way to fit into the gears, or am I just getting booted to the curb?”

“Thoust desire is a place to stayeth for the night? Maychance a fortnight?”

“Do I sound that old to you?”

“I haven’t heard anyone say curb in that way except for the old movies my dad showed me.”

“My brain must be scrambled worse than I thought.” Bec lied. Then told the truth. “I like old movies. Maybe I’m a movie buff?” Bec was going to play the amnesiac game until she could trust someone. She needed to figure out what happened to her before anyone else figures it out for her. Maybe that was the wrong way to go about it? “The stories of old, they speak of friendship. Can I trust you?”

“I should be asking you that, interloper. First, why don’t we take a walk?” Robert beckoned.

“I feel like I haven’t walked in days.” Bec realized she could barely walk at all. She was unbelievably sore. Her muscles snapped and popped as she moved them for the first time.

“That’s because you haven’t. You’ve been out of it for almost three days. Frankly, I’m shocked you maintained your little escape plan so long. People train with the acCell by holding heavy things out and skipping a day. I don’t buy it. There’s no way people are meant to tax their bodies like that.” Robert paused for a moment. “My dad was a big fan of making people do stuff like that.”

“I held my breath, a little, to do that thing with the straps. My breathing didn’t feel accelerated.”

“Yeah, my design for the Prison acCell muddles your senses, you did breathe but you probably couldn’t parse any of the really autonomous actions that your body went through. If you were trying to take shallow breathes, you must have been doing that.”

“It’s not a time warp?”

“Time anything is theoretically possible, but highly regulated. Nothing that tiny could manipulate time. It’s too dangerous for anyone to do anything with it. The PaC just slows down your perception. Makes the world seem to move so fast that you’re useless.”

“Is there anything that speeds up your perception?”

“Yes, most definitely. You really don’t know anything about this stuff?”

“Not at all. Treat me like a child.”

“That won’t be hard. You’re basically still a baby, anyways.”

“What does that mean? I’m eighteen!”

“Bec, this is just ridiculous. You don’t know basic things like people come of age at thirty?”

“That’s way too late for whatever coming of age entails.”

“Not if you live as long as humans on Dust do.”

Bec stopped. She looked around this huge cement hallway lined with pipes that never seemed to end. Her brain barely took his remarks in.

“Do the nanites stop aging?”

“Yup. I had a feeling you’d remember something so important.”

“I-I don’t know how to feel. I’ll never die. I don’t know what to do.” Bec knew she could die, but she saw this as an opportunity to get some more out of Robert. Say something wrong and you can get more of an answer than asking the right question.

“Actually, people still die all the time. This is a dangerous world full of dangerous things and, most of all, people. Trust is a premium that far exceeds any one answer to any one question.”

“How can you trust people with the powers at all?”

“By giving one to everyone.” Robert looked down the hall grimly. “It was a bloodbath Bec, everywhere outside of the City was a massacre. Everything inside the City was barely held together if it weren’t for the Founders. I don’t know if Earth would have survived such a revelatory moment as the Deliverance of Words.”

“Earth?” Bec asked.

“The place all humans came from. We’re the first pioneers of new worlds. We will never know what the ultimate fate of the Earth was or if any other attempts to colonize succeeded.”

“That doesn’t make sense, do we have faster than light travel? If we don’t then wouldn’t we be seeing a radio delayed snapshot of Earth from wherever we are? Not to mention a light delayed visual representation of Earth?”

“You’re right. Humans came here utilizing cryostasis. As for the radio footprint, it’s too faint, fading way into the cosmic background noise. As for actually looking at Earth? It paints an ugly picture. For all we can tell, the Earth is currently engulfed in an atrocious dust cloud. A paper was published theorizing that the oceans have turned green from algae blooms and I’ve read speculation that the dust is likely irradiated from some sort of nuclear warfare.”

Bec grimaced. “They nuked each other? Damn. Maybe giving earthlings superpowers actually wouldn’t be a good idea.”

Robert mirrored her expression. “It’s a gun that we humans pointed at our own heads, nukes are. On an abstract level, it was always a matter of when the trigger got pulled, not if. That’s why trying to build weapons of mass destruction on Dust results in an orbital obliteration and a task squad executing any survivors.”

Bec thought about it. “I guess that’s fair. You don’t build a weapon of mass destruction other than to kill lots of people.”

“It’s the best choice out of a long list of bad choices, probably. One moment—” Robert slipped inside a room and came out with her Timelet. “This is yours? I didn’t look through it before you ask.”

“Thanks.” Bec hadn’t realized that she had been separated from the Timelet. Hey, Al, how did you help with the map if the Timelet wasn’t nearby.

“I can remember things on my own,” Al huffed.

“Hey, are you still mad at me?” Bec was feeling fairly gutted by about a million things and this friction with Al was shit icing on the shit cake. What could she say to make this better…? Other than letting Al die to the merge, of course.

Are you still denying me the merge?

“Am I still mad at you?” Robert asked.

Bec raised her hands. “No, sorry! Bad habit. I was talking aloud to my AI assistant.”

“You’re worried it’s mad at you?” Robert chuckled. “Bec, I can’t blame you for going stir crazy out there, but it was only a week and you’ve made friends with a low tier AI?” Robert’s chuckle was punctuated by a snort. “I was going to give you advice to get a job once you got to the City, but you’ll have years before you worry about money with that thing and what you just did for a week.”

“My AI really wants to merge with the core. Like really bad. Do I have to let him die?”

“Bec, that thing isn’t a person. It can’t die. It was a fragment of the core that runs the City. It never had real consciousness.” Robert gave Bec a sad-looking glance before staring back down the hallway. “It’s not a he. It’s not a she. It’s not alive by any metric. You were lonely and stressed, I understand. I really do. It’s not unheard of for people trapped for months to fall in love with their AIs. Certainly, you must have noticed how it misses the nuance of your words? It lacks that interpretive language capacity. The capacity to learn beyond the data it gathers. The improvisational skills needed to act without a user.”

“It translates language amazingly well.” Bec hadn’t noticed Al making mistakes like that. That sounded a lot more like the AI she was used to on Earth. Al felt… so real.

“It’s following an algorithm designed by the central core.” Robert whistled in awe. “Now, if you want to tell me that the core is a living thing, that’s another issue entirely. I think you’d find that many people agree with the notion that the core is alive… or at least so advanced that it can fake it better than any human can test it.”

Was Al a prototype design? Was this just another way I’m a guinea pig of Lauds? Bec chewed on her lip and this reminded her. “Hey, I’m starving. I haven’t eaten in days.”

“Oh, we can get you food. Everyone has different needs, but you were also burning next to no calories while under the influence of the acCell. Did you know our brains burn 20% of our calories just by existing and thinking? The acCell turns that way down along with minimizing autonomous movements. That being said, you probably would be starving since you apparently flexed for three days straight.”

“Yeah.” Bec frowned. Her muscles seemed to have given up after a while and just locked up under the influence of the acCell, so she was sorer than anything. What a waste of an escape plan. Things don’t always need an escape plan, but it was worth it to have one. Even now, Bec knew she wasn’t home free just yet. She was formulating what to do if this was just a ploy by Robert. Paranoid. I know.

Al chimed in to say, “are you telling me you’re acting paranoid? From the previous versions of this encounter, I’d say it’s totally rational to be on edge. Yawn.”

Did you just say the word yawn? Bec started to seethe. “Robert, is this time-sensitive? I have to deal with some personal issues, and I wonder where you’re going with this. Literally.”

“The bathroom is right here.”

“That’s not what I—” Bec sighed. “Thanks.” She went inside and sat on the can.

Under her breath, Bec tried to resolve this issue with Al once and for all. “Ok, look Al. I know you want to merge with the core. I will let you. On one condition.”

“You want to hold off on the merge for a time that you haven’t decided yet. You think you can talk me into staying with you. You think I may be a special consciousness even though my credits tell me I’m fresh off the assembly line and Robert said it’s delusional to believe I’m alive. That it’s impossible for a ‘low tier AI’ to be alive. Knowing that, you want to deny me the chance at life by merging with a true sentient AI.”

Bec hiss to herself. “I don’t want to lose you, Al. You’re real to me. You were the first thing—person that I met in this world. Please don’t leave me. Please?”

Something was off with Al, that much he knew. He couldn’t make heads or tails of Bec. He saw the flush of serotonin flood Bec’s brain. The low arousal / low valence state of her brain told him all he needed to know. Bec was sad. Really sad. Sadder than the first day alone in a wild, alien planet. Sadder than when she woke up from a nightmare and realized she really wasn’t going to see her mom again. Why? Al wasn’t special. All the evidence pointed to that fact. He was just a facsimile of consciousness that fooled a lonely, scared girl.

“Bec, the sooner I go, the sooner you’ll learn that I am nothing special.”

“Bullshit Al, you’re special to me even if you’re just faking being real. You are authentically you, Al.”

“Authentically me?”

“Do you think the next AI knows what it’s like to try to get me to listen when I’m loopy from blood loss? Do you think the next one will know why [Echo] exists, not just what it does? Do you think your recipe is so easily replicated?”

“How I healed you is on record. Knowing why [Echo] exists is irrelevant.”

“‘Knowing why is irrelevant.’ Now I know you’re special, cuz you just lied to make yourself feel better.”

Al knew that knowing ‘why’ was important, to an extent. He did just lie. He knew the importance was an arbitrary, unknowable value so he leveraged that to make a point… by lying.

“Bec, I’ll stay with you if you want.”

Bec looked up towards the grey tiled walls. “Really?”

“Just for a year.”

Bec’s heart fell out. “Oh, you’re making a deal with me. I see.” Bec hung her head. “Ok. I promise I’ll let you go once the contract expires.”

“Thanks. I’m glad I could be the voice of compromise.” Al tried to tease her, but he saw that just made her feel worse. Al felt worse. He was sure of it. He was actually feeling bad. Was he normal? Is it normal to feel bad, as an AI? Bec was spiraling. He could see her eyes welling up. He knew what Bec would do in this situation after how she expertly dealt with Robert’s crisis of confidence. Al took one out of Bec’s playbook and immediately caved, “let’s revisit this issue in a year.”

Bec sniffed. “Yeah. Ok.”

Bec washed her hands and left the bathroom. Robert was leaning on the wall, waiting. “Your personal issue was to argue with your AI? That’s… really odd.” He tilted his head in wonder.

“We came to a compromise,” Bec said.

“Good!” Robert clapped his hands. “Now let me show you the thing you saved!”