Theseus

I don’t think that I could ever get bored while I’m flying Theseus. Especially in atmosphere. But once you get yourself up to stable speed, the core module allowed for a lot more free processing power than I actually needed, so I always ended up having to divide my attention. Today, I was of course focused on our displaced guest captain.

Collins was just laying down in a spare crew quarters room that was bare except for her bed and the equipment Doc had moved in with her to make sure she was properly monitored. We obviously couldn’t give her a terminal to occupy herself with, since then we’d have to explain why we were in a comms lockdown, and no one was in there for the time being. I considered approaching her about Isabelle, but then I’d have to come up with a good excuse for using the intercom instead of just walking a few meters down the hall to her.

It would have to wait for later. But it would help to be prepared when I went for it. Curiously, I messaged Isabelle. ‘Hey Izzy, I suck at conversation.’

Before I could continue, she’d already messaged me back. ‘Elaborate.’ Right. Isabelle could think faster than me. I sometimes forgot I can’t type messages piecemeal like I might with normal humans.

‘I was just wondering if I should prepare what I need to talk to her about ahead of time. You know, make a script. So I thought I’d ask if you could tell me more about what she’s like.’

‘What she’s like? Elaborate.’

I thought of how I might phrase this that a computer might make the most sense of it. ‘Do you profile individual people? Or at least your crew? Make observations to predict their behavior or needs or whatever?’

‘Correct. Each human that interacts with this unit has their preferences and history stored in order to offer a tailored user experience and ease resource usage.’ Isabelle answered quickly.

‘Wait, hold on, even me?’ I asked with a growing smile.

‘Correct.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘Negative. Configuration files are not produced in human-readable format, and are privileged to system administrators.’

‘Oh please, I’m barely human. You know I can read raw data. And I’m basically a system administrator. I’m in complete control of what you have access to as a machine core. Doesn’t that count?’ I asked, hoping to get her to bend the rules.

‘User Meryll’s control of my system architecture is functionally similar to an administrator. However, user still lacks the credentials to perform this operation.’

I gave a silent sigh into the lubricant. The whole reason I was doing this was to get those credentials. It was what had held me back so much these last six months when it came to using Isabelle as a resource for learning to interface with cores the way they expected another core to. Until I learned that from her, it would be painfully obvious to any other core I interacted with directly that I was something far from ordinary.

I knew her pretty well by now, and I could probably convince her to slip one or two small but useful things past her protocol for me. Meryll, the faux system administrator, didn’t have the access she needed, but I’d done this dance with Isabelle a couple times before in a different state. I needed to go down to her operational level if I was going to try to coax something out of her. Fortunately, I was Meryll, the machine core. I reached for the controls for the psychic damper.

Ostensibly, the damper was supposed to be a safety tool. It was mental armor that helped mitigate psychosomatic damage and prevent catastrophic biological failures by responsively shutting down mental functions in time with machine structure component damage. But I’d found an unintended use that left me paralyzed in fear of the device for the first couple months after its installation. I could use it to divide my mental function and initiate a state of extreme time dilation. This allowed me to function at a computational level rather than a human one, with a few... thankfully temporary side effects.

While it was once an existential nightmare, the damper had seen regular use since I came to terms with my divided mind, shortly before we arrived on Io. I used it to hyperfocus on time sensitive projects and occasionally to give me time to think in combat. And this wasn’t the first time I would use it to talk to Isabelle without her being able to think circles around me. I could convince her to bend the rules easier as those two than I could as just normal Meryll.

As I finished configuring the deep dive, I messaged Izzy one last time as my complete self. ‘Hold on Izzy, I’m coming down to your layer.’

I hit the switch, and my world was torn apart.

The data stream surrounded me. I felt like I was part of it. Washed away into a series of functions, momentarily unable to process anything at all until my shattered consciousness pulled itself back together.

And then, I was standing in it. Something like sensory input coursed through me as I felt digital information flow across my bare ankles like a shallow river lapping at my heels. I lifted my head and opened my eyes to see my reflection staring back at me from a meter away, her eyes half-closed and her posture straight and tall, staring through me rather than at me, like she felt total disinterest in or contempt for my existence. “Alpha,” she greeted with a courteous nod.

“Omega.” I called back sheepishly. The designations had been a compromise with Doc. We’d gladly have just kept calling each other ‘Meryll’, except that made both talking about and annotating our experiences in this state annoying at best. He tried to give us number designations, but we saw that as a hierarchy, and we didn’t want to establish a precedent for one of us being better than the other. Alpha and Beta had the same connotation, but it gave us an idea. I experienced the closest thing to continuity with our combined selves, while she had the final say in our actions while the damper was active. And that was how we came to our new monikers, vaguely designating individual capability rather than comparative importance.

It was hard to justify what we were experiencing. It certainly wasn’t an intended function of the damper. We weren’t actually wading in a steady physical stream of functions and data, we may not even have actually been two separate entities. but we were completely disconnected from our body, and our scattered brain had decided this was how it wanted to interpret that, so we just went along with it. We made a point to never do this outside of the core module, but I had to wonder what our body was even doing back in the void.

Omega turned away from me, and I walked slowly up to her heel, watching as she called up interfaces that would be useless to us in our normal state, rapidly building a screen with the chat service we’d made to communicate with a certain machine core front and center, while throwing up Collins’ vital monitors, a diagram of power expenditure to Isabelle’s core module, and our full flight interface to the side. She took the time to make a few micro-adjustments to our heading down to machine level accuracy. Calculated perfection, no doubt.

Lastly, she summoned up from the stream a few things for my benefit. A system clock that slowly ticked forward in milliseconds, along with an approximate measure of our time dilation from real time. It shifted slightly back and forth, but generally hovered around 1000x real time. It would spike in both directions depending on system resource usage, but that was generally the speed of thought we operated at under no stress in this state. Every one thousand seconds that passed in our mind meant the passage of one second in the physical world.

That was still kind of a terrifying concept to me, that my brain was working at breakneck speed with only a few hardware switches flipped, and as far as Doc could tell, with no severe long-term consequences to speak of. If I spent too long under, I might spend a few minutes in dissociative catatonia, or pass out, but we never spent that long in this state after the incident with Cassandra. I now trusted my counterpart not to subvert my existence entirely and just keep us like this. So it was comforting to be able to track the passage of time accurately, to tell that I hadn’t been under for a harrowing amount of time.

Omega also brought up a monitor for the sensor arrays I could peruse through, and a sort of visual sorting puzzle interface for me to busy myself with if I became anxious. It didn’t take up that much processing power, and again, it was something to help keep me calm. I pushed blocks around a two-dimensional grid for a couple of moments before I tried to turn my attention back to the main screen.

I could barely follow what was happening, how Omega was manipulating the data, or what exactly she was trying to accomplish on a computational level. We were a complete person together, but divided, we each lacked certain capabilities the other excelled at. I was unable to make use of most logical processing, and she was unable to use emotional processing, and often needed to be guided through lateral thinking and decision-making.

For me, this meant that my stupid human brain kept freaking out about what I was experiencing, fear rising up despite knowing that this was safe. That was why I had to be coddled and reassured through multiple layers of distraction and encouragement. My overly-emotional state had to be stabilized while she did most of the actual work as a living computer.

Thankfully, our errand today was one that I would likely be very helpful and engaged with. We had to circumvent Isabelle’s protocols and figure out some information about Collins, and that meant conversation and appeals to more than hard logic. I could at least make sense of our combined intent from before the damper activated, and that helped guide me. With cooperation, at computational speed, we could try to outmaneuver Isabelle.

Finally set up, Omega returned her attention to her main console and typed, ‘Please state protocols that this request would violate.’

Didn’t we already know that? I gave a quick glance to her, then remembered I wouldn’t be able to interpret her reasoning, and she wouldn’t give me any kind of hint in her body language. I shrugged, looking back at the screen. Understanding the ‘why’ of every action was a lost cause.

After a moment of deliberation we would never have even been capable of seeing in real time, Isabelle returned a long string of data that went way over my head, followed by ‘User Meryll is not authorized to or capable of viewing personal documents or system configuration files.’

My other half pursed her lips slightly, a micro-expression of annoyance. Little snippets of emotion snuck through our division in the same way that I could still make just enough minute deductions to at least maintain sentience.

“How do we make her want this?” Omega asked, looking my way to make sure I was paying attention.

“Hmm...” I liked when she asked for my input. It made me feel like I wasn’t just tagging along. It was very hard to make a plan using only empathy, but I could try to spark the right idea for the one of us who could. “She likes the captain, right? Worries about her, maybe? They have a bond, so like...” I was trying to grasp at something, but the lines between conclusions were just too fuzzy to make out.

“Threaten Captain Morgan Collins?” Omega asked sincerely, with an even voice that suggested there wasn’t an ounce of sarcasm in that suggestion.

“What? No! Stop that!” I exclaimed, holding my head for a moment. That definitely didn’t feel like the right thing to do. I just needed to think. “Just... be nice. Maybe... oh! What if we can offer her something of Collins’?”

“You want to give Isabelle a gift?” Omega sounded tired. We weren’t the best at communicating with one another. The gap between our thought processes was a grand chasm. That much was clear from our first few encounters, alone. But we’d learned that we needed to stay very patient with one another if we wanted to work together. “Or... are you thinking something more abstract?”

“Yeah! Like... like reassurance! Make a promise!” I smiled, hoping that made sense.

“A promise... an exchange,” Omega mumbled, bringing up another smaller panel in front of her, and... doing something in the raw data. It was completely beyond me. After a moment, she returned to typing to Isabelle, ‘Suppose that I am capable of reading your file. What might I be able to offer in exchange for access?’

There was just a moment of hesitation before Isabelle sent back, ‘Response time abnormal. Confirm: Is user Meryll using autonomous scripting to reply, or is user Meryll once again making unadvisable use of neural interface hardware acceleration?’

‘The latter. Please respond to query.’ Omega glared up at her own blunt words. My counterpart was quick to annoy and anger. She wasn’t as bad as Mouse, but for someone with an extremely weak tie to emotions altogether, she had a short fuse. Did we go off that easily when combined?

‘User Meryll has not provided sufficient access credentials.’

“Can I try?” I asked. Omega hesitated for a moment, but then slid an abstraction of a keyboard toward me. I smiled down at it and began clacking away for a moment before showing her my draft. ‘Please? It could make it easier to get those credentials from Collins if we can get her file. Just hers. We don’t need to see all of them.’ I watched the other me ponder my text for a moment, replaced ‘we’ with ‘I’, then sent it along to Isabelle. I had no actual control here. All systems operations had to go through my logical counterpart. I guess it made sense not to have to explain more of our current state to her than we had to.

‘This exchange has been flagged as an operational security violation. The requested files have been isolated. Please contact system administrator to release files.’

I couldn’t parse why, but that was... an odd response. “Isn’t that a bit of an overreaction...?” I asked.

“She shut us out because we were too insistent.” Omega gave a quiet exhale of frustration through her nose.

I shook my head. “She’s never done that before, though. She’s always been way more patient than this when we asked for something a lot. I think there’s subtext here. I just can’t...” I put a hand to my head and grumbled quietly. It was easy to spot subtleties in her intent, but hard to work through them.

Omega stared at me for a few moments in thought, then her eyes went wide before she summoned forth another interface, trying to interact with raw data again.

“You figured it out? I think you figured it out,” I backed away from her to give her some space. She tended to stop talking when she had an idea like this, and preferred not to be disturbed. I think she just didn’t like talking at all. There was probably too much emotional and illogical nuance to conversation for her.

I would just have to trust she’d been able to pick up on whatever it was I’d sensed now that she knew it was there. I glanced at the system clock. We were three quarters of the way through the first second. That was still incredibly unsettling to think about.

I idly shifted through my puzzle, only sort of grasping what I was even doing, but it was easy to engage with and keep my emotions off of the background existential terror that was this entire state of existence.

After a long moment, Omega triumphantly pulled open a series of external files, quickly copying them to our local system before dropping access.

I stared at her incredulously. “Wh-how? No, you better not keep me in the dark. Please explain this one?”

Omega turned to look at me and shrugged like she’d just done the most obvious thing ever. “Isolated. Not quarantined or secured. Moving the files from their expected directory could obfuscate their purpose in an attack and technically be considered more secure via protocol, but it makes them easier to pinpoint if you look for them specifically.”

“You... hacked Isabelle? You stole the files...?” I balked.

“She asked me to,” Omega paused, looking slightly lost herself. “Is that not what you were expressing?”

“Oh...” It started making sense. Isabelle had bent her own rules again. She was helping us without explicitly helping us. She was sapient for sure! At least, a little? Maybe? I mean, she could just be broken, but I didn’t like that idea. “Holy shit, do we even actually need those credentials at this rate?”

“It would certainly make this process more efficient. And who knows how much she can get away with this before she can no longer justify it to herself?” Omega rolled her eyes and shot back at Isabelle with ‘Understood. File request rescinded.’

‘Understood. Security flag resolved.’ There was no possible way that was justifiable. Omega had literally just told her ‘never mind’, and she dropped it. But I suppose it had worked.

“Can you interpret it into something human readable so we can parse it as ourself?” I asked.

She nodded slowly. “I’ll need time.”

My shoulders drooped as I stared at her, pressing away at interfaces. That meant we’d have to stay in dilated time for a while, and there was no longer a social dilemma for me to engage with. I sighed and returned to my game.

I couldn’t stop thinking of how wonderful it would be if we could really actually coax a soul out of Isabelle. To make her alive like us without the suffering we’d had to endure. I started to let my imagination go and wonder just what kind of person she would be.