Theseus

I watched from my prison as she operated with terrifying efficiency, my mental construct of myself busily running calculations and sending signals to ever-so-slightly manipulate the orientation of Theseus while repositioning its cannons. In a matter of seconds that I knew were truly only milliseconds, she had already carefully planned exactly where our shots would land and calculated the reaction to the debris it would create.

I could barely understand every little action she was performing within the system. All I could feel was the despair of watching from the outside as she prepared to kill my sister with brutal certainty.

In a flash, it was finished. The next several seconds of action were planned out with reasonable contingencies for the most likely outcomes. I hated how simple it was. How easy it was going to be to remove her from this life. My beloved sister who I had only just begun to recall my love for was going to be annihilated, and it was my fault for not coming up with a way to save her.

My counterpart’s metaphysical hand hovered over the command that would unleash her calculated fury and end this assault. But she stopped.

The clock ticked forward at its impossibly slow pace, but she took no action. Then she lowered her hand and closed her eyes. “There is time.” She declared, then turned and looked directly at me with that face of concentrated indifference.

I knew this wasn’t real. I knew this was all an abstraction of my cybernetically altered mind layered onto my imagination, but in that moment, it didn’t matter. There were two of us floating in the depths of that digital ocean, and she towered far over me. She had all the control. Did she mean to gloat? Did she wish to highlight the palpable fear for her that consumed me?

I hadn’t so much spoken in this state before as I screamed in agony over my inability to do anything or even think clearly. But now, as the center of her attention, that must have offered me enough clarity to do more than wail in despair.

“What are you doing?” I asked dully, my heart already broken by what had to be done. I had no fight left in me to flail and demand freedom this time. I may as well fade away in despair now. “Just get it over with.”

“The optimal time to fire will be in approximately 2.87 seconds,” she droned, no hesitation or sorrow in her voice, only cold certainty. “Something else must be addressed in the interim.”

I sniffled, feeling like tears had come to my eyes. “If you want to delete me, do it before I have to kill Lily,” I grumbled. “I don’t even care anymore. I deserve it.”

She stared at me with those cold, calculating eyes. I wondered if I ever physically looked like that when I was fully myself. Then she rigidly shook her head. “What are we?”

The question caught me off guard. It wasn’t related to the problem at hand at all, was it? Why would she focus on that now? I regretted not waiting a little longer to activate the damper, so that there was less time to mull things over like this. I felt myself grow mad at the audacity of the question, though. “You are nothing!” I spat. “You’re just a computer. You’re... you’re an unfeeling copy of me that wants me out of the way so you can... operate Theseus efficiently! That’s all! You don’t even care what you’re about to do!”

She stared at me and slowly nodded at something. “What is eighteen plus twenty-four?”

What? I grit my teeth and glared at her, wondering what the hell that was supposed to mean. “Is this some kind of test?”

“Yes. What is the sum of eighteen and twenty-four? Calculate it,” she demanded.

I wasn’t certain what she could possibly be getting at, but I humored her. “It’s...” I opened my mouth to continue, but what should have been a simple calculation a child could do was slipping through my thoughts like sand between my fingers. Try as I could, I couldn’t come up with the answer. “I... don’t know?” I asked.

Wait. What? What was happening to me?

She nodded carefully. “I see. I had believed the opposite in our earlier encounters. That you were a construct created by the damper. An isolated structure holding my invasive thoughts at bay so that I could work clearly. But it appears we were both mistaken.”

“What does that have to do with math?!” I shouted.

“I do not know if you will be capable of comprehending this.” She said carefully, clearly pondering something. “For lack of a better way to put it... I cannot feel. You cannot think. You must be suppressed for us to operate efficiently, and I cannot experience independent continuity outside of this state.”

“What the hell does that mean?!” I shouted angrily, my frustration mounting.

“That neither of us is a construct. It means that we are two halves of a whole. I am the mind, you are the soul. You are not simply a function holding part of me. We are collectively Meryll, sundered. I think that perhaps we already understood that before we used it this time, after contemplating Isabelle’s nature, but were not capable of consciously parsing it.”

I felt... confused. I was Meryll. But she was also Meryll? But I felt like I’d just been shoved to the back of my head, in whole, when the damper activated. My head felt like mush while I tried to make sense of it. She was right. I couldn’t think clearly. I could barely reason what this meant. “What does that mean?!” I eventually screamed.

She held her hand out in front of her as if requesting me to stop. “Calm. I cannot empathize. You are made of emotion. You are illogical. Stop trying to make sense of this the way I can. Come to a conclusion in the way that you must.”

Reason without logic. Conclusion without thought. Focus on what I can control. I swallowed my fear and anxiety. Those weren’t helping. I closed my eyes and tried to think about this revelation. How did it make me feel? Confused? Confusion didn’t help without logic to untangle it. If she was right, I couldn’t understand it. Not like that. Was this some kind of insanity? No, that concern over an errant thought wasn’t helping. I was already trying to control so many wild emotional tangents, though. I shook my head in frustration.

“Deep breaths. That action precedes calm.” She reminded me.

Deep breaths... Part of me was aware that this wasn’t really breathing because this whole conversation was a mental construct, but the idea of taking a deep breath did help ease the turmoil. “Why are you helping me?” I asked, almost in tears.

“Now that I understand what you are, why would I not help myself?” She asked.

“I thought you wanted me gone. You tried to delete me. I was so scared.” I took in another deep breath. “What changed?”

“We learned.” She said simply. “Though you are not conducive to the operation of Theseus, it may be of vital importance not to ignore you entirely. You are, after all, the core of our existence outside of this space. As such, it would be unwise to hurt you.”

“So you’re being nice to me because you have to?” I asked.

“... Is that a comforting thought?”

“Not at all...” I whimpered. “Why would you think that’s comforting?”

“I don’t.”

I paused for a moment. The reality that she didn’t feel at all made me feel uncertain and numb. “Do you intend to keep me here?”

“The end of our last meeting was disastrous. The damage to our brain and our systems could perhaps have been mitigated if I had ended the damper’s function myself; something that I am fully capable of. Keeping the damper active beyond necessity was an error bred by ignorance. I will not make the mistake of assuming my role is indefinite this time.” She turned back away from me. “But for the purposes of combating this enemy, yes. I will be holding you until the threat has been neutralized. You are currently a hindrance to our ability to protect ourselves and our crew.”

“Oh.” I groaned quietly, descending into despaired silence while my counterpart made minor adjustments to her plan for the meager changes that had happened in the fraction of a second that had passed since she had constructed the end of the battle. “If you can’t feel anything, why comfort me?”

“The intent was not to comfort, it was to inform. I reasoned that this would make you more cooperative and less distracting.” She glanced back at me for a moment. “I expect you to inform me if my decisions may have long-term emotional consequences on our well-being. Calmly.”

I nodded slowly. Did that mean she was allowing me some say in our decisions? Did that mean I wasn’t going to be as completely powerless as I’d felt so far? I suddenly felt that, even if I was still caged, I was standing beside this other me, not beneath her. Not just a tiny trapped speck beholding a god. She was in control, but did she really respect my input?

“Long-term emotional consequences...” I mumbled, suddenly returning to the actual matter at hand. “I’m... going to feel devastated. I already feel so guilty about what’s happening to Lily. I love her so much and now we have to kill her. It’s not fair.”

“I suppose that it isn’t,” my counterpart agreed. “The circumstances that led us here were far outside of our control.

“Is there anything we can do? Anything at all?” I stared down into the depths of the digital ocean surrounding us. “Was there anything we could have done?”

My logical side paused her work. “Perhaps. Lily’s problems are far outside of my realm of understanding, but perhaps a different approach in our previous interactions could have prevented her from attacking us.”

“Don’t say that,” I whined. “This really is all my fault...”

“She is the one who decided to attack us. It is not our fault at all.”

“But we drove her to this! If-If I hadn’t told her the truth, then-”

“Then she would have returned to Foundation and become an even greater threat.” She turned back toward me, sounding like she was becoming impatient.

“This isn’t about her being a threat!” I couldn’t believe that’s what she was focused on here; that a part of me could be so selfish. “Lily is in pain! A lot of kinds of pain! And yeah, maybe she’d be in a different kind of pain where they were sending her, I don’t know! But because of what we said, she’s suffering the way she is right now! And-and she loves us so much that she wants to end our pain too.”

“She is trying to kill us,” she said flatly.

“Because she doesn’t have a choice! You remember it, right? That dream. We were... we felt awful, constantly. And there were no choices left to make. We couldn’t even think what we did through, we just... did things.” I sniffled, holding myself tight. “Awful things...”

“It makes no difference.” She declared. “Now, we only have one course of action. We must protect ourselves. Lily will die no matter what action we take. The only question at hand is if we go with her.”

“Can’t you do anything though?! Anything at all! Please! You need to stop her, I get that! But can’t you... I don’t know! I can’t think clearly! I have no ideas! I just know that if we kill her here, then we’ll... we’ll never be able to forgive ourselves. We’ll never stop feeling guilty. We’ll be in our own kind of pain again. And we’ll never be able to escape it.”

My counterpart remained silent for what felt like a long time, then glanced back to the interface she’d been utilizing and began her optimization work once more, building further contingencies depending on the arc of the ship’s debris. “1.49 seconds until optimal firing range.” She muttered. “We will be alive. That is the optimal outcome.”

“Is it?” I sniffled. “I already feel like I would rather die.”

The other me stopped in her tracks, still staring into the image she’d constructed of projected paths and firing angles. “Do you remember what Aisling told us once? You can’t shoot to wound.”

My eyes went wide. I hadn’t been able to form the idea myself, but as soon as she put it in the air between us, it felt obvious. “But you can! You can aim as carefully as you need to! You still have so much time! You can disable her ship! We can still save her!”

She gave a frustrated grunt, looking down at herself. “No. We cannot. That was her entire point. That we can only shoot to kill.” She let out a quiet groan. “The fact that I can do it is immaterial. It would cascade into an unacceptable risk of failure. I can all but guarantee the course of the wreckage in the aftermath of that ship’s destruction. A pile of metal slag is simple to predict. A half-functional starship is not. There is an unacceptable probability that she would still take us with her.”

“How unacceptable?” I asked.

“I refuse to explain that. You will not have an objective understanding of it. It does not matter what I say, your emotions will drive you to take any risk. I can prove it. What would you consider an acceptable chance that I wound her and we die anyway?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter? It’s Lily’s life.” I tried to wrack my brain for a few moments, but there was no way for me to pull together any kind of reasoning for how I felt, so I just threw out a high number. “Eighty! I’d accept an eighty percent chance we don’t make it!”

“And then we would almost certainly die. You probably cannot even understand why this should clearly not be your decision to make.

Our shared metaphysical space went silent for some time as we watched the milliseconds tick by. I started to cry. I knew there must be some logical way I could sway the part of me that was in control now. The idea had now been planted into me, so maybe I could pull it off now if I could shut down the damper. Except, I wasn’t capable of that, and without computational time, there was no way I’d be able to mount the precision I’d need to ensure I didn’t just kill her by accident. I wouldn’t even be able to evade in time if I were in full control now.

Lily was going to die, and there was nothing I could do.

“Seventeen percent.” She broke the silence.

“Huh?” I sobbed.

“If I were to make a disabling shot, I estimate approximately a one in six chance of collision. Seventeen percent,” she said with resignation.

“That sounds reasonable to me!” I shouted.

“Then you do not understand probability. If we were to take every one in six chance over a safe choice of certainty, then we would be dead within our first six choices on average. A decision with half as much risk would still be too much of a chance.”

“But this isn’t every decision! This is Lily!” I cried out desperately. “She saved us. She loved us. She did everything she could to get us through a nightmare! She took her chance on us! What do you think the odds were for her?!”

“Her precognition allows her to mitigate risks. We do not have the gift of foresight like she does.”

“But she doesn’t see everything! She definitely didn’t see this!” I gestured toward the complex diagram she’d been planning so far. “She didn’t see the pain she’s in. I know she didn’t see herself being driven this far. I know she wouldn’t choose to do this to us. To herself!”

“Enough!” My counterpart barked sharply. I suddenly felt small again. Like the contempt she’d held for me had just come rushing back. Like I was once again small and insignificant and unheard. Like I could be stomped out of existence on a whim. “I have erred in allowing your input. Perhaps on future matters, but not on this one. This one was already decided before we were split apart. On this, we have no choice. There is only one thing we can do. Damn the emotional consequences.”

We returned to uncomfortable silence as time drew nearer. I wasn’t good at calculating exact timings like she was, but I watched the system clock tick by as we came nearer to the designated optimal firing time.

“I guess she was right after all.” I whispered to myself.

“Yes, that we cannot shoot to wound.” My logical side nodded.

I shook my head. “Not her.” I let out a sigh and closed my eyes. I already knew that this would haunt me for the rest of my life. The time I wouldn’t even take a chance for someone I dearly loved and would miss. “I’m really just not good enough.”

I heard the slightest hitch in my counterpart’s movements and looked up. I couldn’t see her face from behind her, but she looked like she was frozen in place. Slowly, her hand dropped to her side, and we returned to true still silence together. A question hung in the air, and neither of us seemed to want to answer it.

And then finally, we hit roughly half a second until the moment of truth, and my other half let out a loud sigh before erupting into a flurry of new motion, setting aside her calculations and beginning anew.

“What are you doing?” I asked, hopefully. She didn’t answer, merely focused on creating some complex script that I couldn’t make any sense of. Finally, after what felt like minutes of tense activity, she came to another sudden halt.

“You are not Meryll in whole. And neither am I. But perhaps if we learn to work together like this, we can be something more. I must trust in compromise.” She turned to look at me again, once more as equals. “So let us roll the dice.” She reached back and launched the newly minted script. I smiled at her and felt a wave of relief as we both blurred together once more.

The damper shut off, and we returned to normal time and whole self, my tense internal negotiation punctuated by the sound of a single shot of precise cannon fire registering outside my shell.