Theseus

“You’re… interested in my piloting?” I let out a chuckle in mild disbelief. I expected the cloning tech to be focused more on the physical issue that I was a clone than on what I was able to do in a simulation. “I mean, I keep all my sim logs, if that’s what you wanted to see.”

Agatha nodded, closing up the computer bay she was working on in the clone’s hip. “That’s my specialty. I develop those kinds of simulations.”

I couldn’t help but stare wide-eyed at her. “You made the sims?” I asked quietly. They were so realistic to me when I ran them. They felt like little temporary worlds that I could almost lose myself in if I hadn’t done them so many times at that point that the mental whiplash of being dragged into a full sensory immersion experience had stopped being novel to me some time ago.

Joel, content that this conversation was going well enough, stepped to the side and sat at a chair out of the way of the entrance so he could be on standby and not get in our way.

“Well, probably not the ones you use, no.” She shook her head “Not like I’m the sole developer in the system or anything. But I bet some of my principles are buried in there somewhere. What you running?”

I glanced down at my side, popping open the case at my hip with the press of a button and slotting out the chipset containing the sim program Aisling had given me, placing it gently onto the table next to the clone, being careful not to touch him.

Agatha smiled and gently lifted the blade, inspecting some markings embedded into the circuitry. “Hmm… not bad. Proprietary Foundation gear. A little dated, but I guess that’s expected from something you’d have to steal to have.” She didn’t sound judgemental about it, just stating facts. I had already figured something like this must have been fenced before Aisling had gotten her hands on it. It felt illegal to be able to train against military specs like this.

Agatha handed the blade back, and I was glad to slip it back into place, having grown accustomed to certain pieces of hardware sitting in my systems at this point. “You can tell all that just by looking at the board?”

“Yeah, serial number matches what the military folks use. I’ve worked on stuff like this before. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you I’m not supposed to tell you that.” She smirked, pulling her tablet aside. “But what I’m really interested in seeing is the logs. I know you must not be using that thing like it’s meant to be used.” She pulled her tablet in front of her and began tapping away, no doubt prepping to give me her address.

I closed my eyes and pinged the terminal, reading along with her in an instant. I grabbed her message address myself before she could say anything, and was already prepping a compressed file of my latest logs. I wanted to hear what this girl had to say. “So you really work on all this advanced stuff? Even for big companies like Foundation?”

She let out a mildly annoyed chuckle “This cause I’m only sixteen? I get enough about my age from all the other fogies living here, don’t start that shit with me too.”

“S-Sorry.” I started. I probably should have figured that it was a sore spot for her. After all, researchers probably valued experience, and being shown up by minors in their field of expertise was probably a big bruise to their egos.

“Don’t sweat it.” She sighed. “Yeah, I get it, I’m still a kid to some people. But I’m the kid who solved the biohacking vulnerability entirely when she was nine, and there are people already standing on my shoulders as one of the giants at the foundation of this industry, so I think I’ve earned my place here.” She was bragging slightly, and I couldn’t totally follow what her accomplishments meant, but it sounded like she was a genius.

Instead of replying out loud, I beat her to the punch of what she was doing, pulling up her ID to give me verbally, and just sent her the message ‘No, I get it, people underestimate me too.’

As she stopped moving and stared at the message, I opened my eyes to watch her startled expression. ‘General terminal security is pretty awful.’ I answered in text before she could ask.

“So I see.” A slow smile grew on her face as she rechecked my address. “You were able to do that just through your neural link? Fuck, are all clones capable of that?” she mumbled aloud to herself.

“Probably.” I finally returned to speaking out loud “But they wouldn’t. They don’t have a sense of humor.”

“You could say that again.” Agatha smirked. “Are you just hacking everything you get near or something?”

“I only break into things that I need to do something with. Or read something off of. Or just to find out what it is.” As I listed off all the use cases for the psionic network I was constantly building, I paused for a moment to consider it and had to admit, “okay, yes, I just hack into everything, don’t I? But I try not to be rude about it. I’ve known Joel over there’s address for weeks, but I didn’t do anything with it until he sent me something himself.”

“Seriously?” Joel muttered with dry indignation. “I swear, privacy doesn’t exist around you.”

“Sorry, I can’t help it.” I shrug.

“Like, actually can’t help it? Is it autonomous?” Agatha sounded curious.

“No, I’m just a curious person.” I could stop pinging everything in sight if I had to, right? “With a half-computer brain that makes it difficult to forget stuff I’ve already seen.”

“Not sure if I like that better.” Joel muttered, looking down at his own tablet and beginning to search the relay network for personal security applications. It made me snort a little seeing him react so quickly to the news.

“Well, there’s definitely no doubting your sentience.” Agatha said suddenly. “You should have seen Godin going off about you on the station’s message boards about you after your little dust-up. Before he got arrested I mean. Already knew the guy was a prick, but you really put a spotlight on it yesterday. Sorry you had to deal with him.”

“Yeah, me too.” I muttered, wishing I’d never had to deal with him in the first place. I made a mental note to look into someone’s terminal later to see if I could have a look at the colony’s more public messaging systems as well. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought to look into public forums related to the colony. “Don’t wanna talk about him, though. He’s not worth it.”

“Amen to that.” Agatha rolled her eyes. She clearly held some kind of personal contempt for the man as well. Whether it was from experience or from hearsay, I didn’t care to pry. “Anyway, I guess if you have my address already anyway, I should ask if you could send me your logs?”

I nodded, glad to change the subject away from my abuser. I sent her the package I’d been compressing together, loaded with all my log files. I trusted her to know what to look for in them.

She opened the files quickly, and I saw a frown slowly grow on her face “No aggregate file?” she muttered.

“My sim data doesn’t collate well.” I start to explain. I was getting tired of everyone pointing it out, honestly. “There’s not enough data, anyway. I can’t run things at machine processing speed without putting severe mental stress on myself, so I don’t have the actual millions of runs that would make aggregate data useful.”

“Oh. That makes sense.” Agatha nodded, piecing what I said together quickly, and then some. “A lot of the mental processes that make you sentient probably make some of the machine part of being a machine core pretty stressful. Still, there’s almost a thousand logs here… only going back about a month. You’ve been very busy to do that much at human speeds…”

“You’d be surprised how much time you spend bored with nothing interesting to do when you’re flying a starship in a straight line with no obstacles for a week.” I shrugged “There’s a lot more downtime to being a ship core than you’d think most times.”

Agatha stared at the data, tabbing through the various mission logs from my sims, fascinated by the figures “I always said arbitrary overall score systems were bullshit and this just proves it.” she mumbled quietly. “This is… fascinating. You were practically already on par with trained standard core operation when you first started. Let me look at the more recent stuff… Wow. Uhh… That’s… absurd.” She grew quieter as she read, becoming engrossed in the files.

“So I’ve been told. I may not have much aggregate data, but I can tell you my overall survival rate in the last week almost hit 99 percent. Across all scenarios.”

“That’s impossible.” She kept thumbing through my logs in silent awe for some time, selecting an arbitrary moment a week ago and moving through subjectively successful mission after mission “Oh, that one failed.”

I closed my eyes to look and let out a hearty laugh “Oh, that one. I get bored sometimes and use the sims to mess around to see what the limits of the training system are. I had a laugh about that with the last person who looked too. See, the AI has no idea what to do if you just… board their frigate. I just flew in behind one of their fighters and landed, and it didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t get back out either so I had to crash into a wall to end the sim.”

Agatha burst out laughing “Well, of course it wouldn’t know what to do, that would be an absolutely absurd thing to try in a real battle. You’d just get held up by the crew, right?”

“I mean, yeah, probably, but the game doesn’t know what to do with it.” I smile, but then realize I just used the wrong word. “Err, not game, sim. It’s probably best not to call it a game, it’s just the other half of my training is…” I hesitated for a moment. The idea that I was actually using a video game to train myself to be a better pilot on the side sounded absurd in a vacuum. “Don’t laugh, but it’s playing this game called Horizon.”

Agatha turned her tablet down dramatically to look at me “No fucking way, you play too?”

I opened my mouth, unsure how to respond to that. I guess it made sense on some level. Agatha was a kid, mature and intelligent as she apparently was, so it made some sense that she might just play video games for fun. And what better game to play for someone who’s as intensely interested in machine simulation as she must have been?

“Yeah. It’s… it’s a great way to hone the more human element I bring to piloting a ship.” I smile slowly “Ever since I started doing both Horizon and the sims, I’ve improved a lot at both.”

“Well, shit, I’ll have to play you sometime.” She smiled, a little bit of a competitive flair showing on her face. “I’m pretty good myself.”

I’d never actually played the game against a human player before, only against the pre-made scenarios the developers had come up with. And those were admittedly becoming a little stale and predictable given I’d already played through them multiple times and in multiple ways. There was only so much a developer could foresee as a novel strategy, I guess. Maybe playing against someone else who could think live rather than with a pre-programmed method could teach me more. “Sounds fun. Can we play over the relay?”

“Might be a little lag depending on how far, but it wouldn’t be bad.” She shrugged. “I’m not gonna hold back, though. You best bring that same expertise you take to the sims.”

Had I just made a friend outside of the crew? Seemed like an odd person to become attached to, but I smiled back at her. Everyone I liked was odd.

Agatha and I spent a couple hours reviewing my logs and geeking out over the behavior of the sims and of our shared gaming interest. It didn’t feel like work to me. I’d found someone who understood what it was like to at least work with a machine, even if she wasn’t one herself. She liked the kinds of things that I liked about machine cores. The fun parts where you got to exercise your knowledge against novel situations to try and use the resources you have on hand to solve a problem.

Eventually, though, the time came to say goodbye.

“This was a lot of fun, actually.” I admitted to her. “I haven’t really had the chance to go over my sims like this with someone who can actually meaningfully evaluate them before.”

“You kidding? It’s fun for me too, I don’t normally get to actually discuss things with a clone. I just have to look at what they do and try my best to nudge them into doing what they’re supposed to do. But you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do, and you make it work. Like, really really well.” she smiled back at me. “I know you can’t stick around forever what with the whole being a starship thing, but you gotta hit me up on the relay sometime, share what you see and experience out there.”

“I’d be happy to.” I nodded back. “We already have each others’ addresses, I’ll message you when I’m in port. No idea where we’re going next, though. Captain’s being all hush hush about it.”

“You’re pirates, they probably don’t want you gossiping about it, anyway.” Agatha spoke casually. At least she doesn’t seem to mind that she’s working with outlaws. I suppose it must just be a normal occurrence living in the inner colonies, though.

“We done here, then?” Joel spoke up from his corner for the first time in an hour. He’d settled in once the atmosphere became casual, sitting with his gun relaxed in his lap and his hands on his tablet as he continued to browse the relay network. He couldn’t fool me though. I caught him browsing to terms we’d said a couple of times, trying to work out what we were talking about when we’d discussed something more technical.

“Got somewhere to be?” I huffed.

“Yeah, gotta take you to your therapist.” He didn’t even look up. “Then I gotta bring you home, and then I gotta pick something up for the captain.”

I knew that ‘picking something up for Aisling’ would probably entail something illegal and dangerous. Aisling was setting some kind of plan into motion so we could leave before our scheduled departure, and it would be a bad idea to make Agatha privy to it, even if she seemed very unlikely to stand in our way.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Got a long day ahead of us.” I lied, knowing that I would be sitting comfortably back in my shell when Joel’s day would just be kicking into gear.

“Nah, I gotcha. It won’t be nearly as interesting as you, but I got real work to do myself.” she gently tapped the clone on the table’s computer bay. “This fucker can’t seem to figure out the difference between ‘faster’ and ‘slower’ and it’s really starting to tick me off.”

“I’ll leave you to it. I don’t communicate well with the rest of my kind, unfortunately.” I admitted, stepping back from the table and motioning for Joel to join me. “I’ll talk to you later. Get ready to get your ass kicked tonight.”

“Oh, it’s on.” She chuckled, popping open the computer bay. She looked refreshed as she returned to her work, Joel and I leaving her behind and returning to the gentle din of Venusian colony life.

It didn’t take more than a few steps away from the door before Joel spoke up. “You two seemed to get along.”

“Yeah. Kinda feels like the relationship you have with Mouse, you know? A smarter than average kid you can relate with.”

Joel opened his mouth to say something, but then decided against it and went quiet. Seemed I’d caught him off-guard with the comparison. “What, you don’t think I’ve noticed? You and Mouse are close. He respects you. You’re both real into physical stuff like keeping in shape and messing with normal machines and guns and stuff.”

Joel shrugged, mulling it over in his head for a little bit before he mumbled “Guess I never really thought about it like that. Mouse is a good kid, grew up in a shitty situation. Guess I can relate.”

I thought for a moment that Joel was about to open up to me. It was disappointing when we returned to awkward silence. I guess Joel was just going to remain a mystery for now.