Theseus

“How...?” Lily mumbled, her dumbfounded face still staring me down through the video feed, “Meryll, how did you do that? You never... Those two cores had elite training, millions of simulated missions, and multiple deployments. You’ve only been gone for two months. How could you possibly have...?” She shook her head slowly. “I didn’t foresee this. What... You... You destroyed one of them. The crew... you killed them.”

Oh. That’s right. These were pursuit fighter ships, but that didn’t mean they were unmanned. I stared back in stunned silence myself this time, resolve suddenly shaken. I hadn’t really considered the core to be a casualty, but these ships had more than a core on board. Even if they had been launched from a larger vessel that would retrieve them, they would need at least one other person to command the core. They weren’t like me, capable of independence. I’d definitely just killed at least one other person. I had to open my eyes for a moment, and I looked down at my hands. Shaking. Self-defense or not, I was a murderer.

No, there was no time for that. I had to be strong. They had been trying to kill me. It was me or them. I did it to protect myself and my crew. Clenching my jaw tight, I closed my eyes again, typing back at her quickly ‘I warned you. I told you that I would take this seriously. You tried to kill me, and they’re dead now because of that. Leave me alone, Lily, or I’ll do worse than this! Send more, see what happens!’ I desperately hoped that she didn’t have more to send, or I would have to risk Ray’s currently very fragile life on it. But I also had to keep up my aggressive momentum, or I’d have to face the emotional weight of what I’d just done.

“Meryll, no!” Lily cried out. “You’re not like that! You’re not... you’re not a monster! You’re not like big sis or Sarah! You don’t kill people! I can’t accept that you could ever become someone like that!”

I’m certainly not someone who wants to kill people. That’s certainly true. But I did just kill someone, didn’t I? I watched that ship explode into a million pieces, and there’s no possible way there was enough of it intact to contain a survivable compartment with active life support. ‘I just did, didn’t I?’ I sent, trying to ignore the sick feeling in my stomach. I couldn’t show weakness now. ‘And I’ll do it again as many times as I have to. To get it through to you and your overlords that I want to be left alone. I don’t give a shit about Foundation’s plans for me, or for much of anything else they do. I just want to live my life with my crew, doing my business. If you want war, then I’ll bring it, but I’m not going back quietly, and I’m not going to sit there and let anyone make a coffin out of me. I will defend myself, and if I have to kill an entire fucking legion of your wage slave goons to be free, then that’s on you, not me.’

Lily slowly straightened up as she read my message, looking more and more sad even as she regained her composure. “Meryll. I don’t want a war either. Because we’d win. It doesn’t matter if you’ve somehow become the best pilot in the universe, they’re too strong to fight. We have too many resources. Nowhere in the system is safe for you. There’s nowhere to run, and you’ll never be able to live a normal life. We live in hell, and Foundation has the only means to make it bearable. They can allow us a life where we can be content. We just have to obey. Don’t say you’re declaring war on us, we’ll... they’ll kill you. Please, you’re so much more important to me than anything else in this world, and I don’t want to lose you.”

‘They can’t make me happy. That false life; it can never make me feel the way I do out here. And this is worth fighting for. Half of what I have now would be worth fighting them. If I’m so fucking important, why won’t you listen to a thing I say?’ I rolled my eyes. She didn’t care about me, not really. I was angry enough at the time to convince myself of it. ‘You only care about some old dead version of me that would bend over backwards for people who just want to use her. You don’t care that I’ve changed. That I became someone who values freedom.’

Lily tried to look angry, but her expression just came off as desperate. “Like that crew isn’t using you! People use each other! And we’re their property! That’s just how things are! We can’t change that, they’re too strong! We’re just things they own, and they’re nice enough to at least give us some way to feel like we’re something more than that! They gave us a way to at least feel like we’re normal! Like we’re...”

She hesitated for just a moment, and I took the opportunity to interject. ‘People?’

She stared at the word, her eyes welling up, “Yeah...”

‘Well, we are. And we deserve to be. In this world, not just for pretend. You don’t have to be beholden to them either, Lily. They’re going to keep treating you like shit until they use you up. And when that day comes, I don’t doubt they’ll kill you if you might be the smallest inconvenience to them. I won’t let them do that to me. None of us should.’

“Are you telling me I should do what you’re doing...?” Lily whined, glancing back and forth at something beyond the camera. Handlers making sure that she didn't say anything they didn't want me to hear? “Th-That’s ridiculous! I can’t fight Foundation. Neither can you. And... even if I wanted to, they would just...” She winced, letting out a pained grunt and holding a hand up to her head. “I don’t want to see us doomed like that. I don’t want us to die without even getting the chance to lead a life, even if it is fake.” She glanced to the side again, and there was a slight flicker in the feed. “M-Meryll, hold on, slow down your ship. You’re getting near the edge of signal range.”

‘That’s the plan.’ I admitted. So she was on a different kind of command ship. Something slower. She couldn’t keep up with me at high speeds. I had to make the next few lines of dialogue count for something. ‘How did you find me?’

There was a short pause. “You don’t even remember what I can do, do you?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I will eventually find you again. They’ll make me find you again. And they’ll bring more ships. Bigger weapons.”

‘So they only found me because of you?’ I asked.

Lily looked down at the floor, a guilty expression on her face, the feed flickering a few more times as the signal weakened. “Yes. I-I don’t have a choice, Meryll. If I don’t do what they say, they’ll hurt me. They’ll kill me. And they’ll kill you before they let you be free, Meryll. Please. It’s not too late. We can still go back to how things were.”

‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ I sighed into the lubricant, the fire of my rebellion beginning to peter out. I was tired. Mentally tired. Emotionally tired. Even my physical body felt tired. I began to accelerate a little more, trying not to push my engines to bursting since they still felt strained, but still moving away from the signal. ‘Lily, if you really want to be by my side, if you want to be my sister, I’d welcome you. In a heartbeat. I can’t quite explain it right now, but I think I understand that we were close. But we can’t be like that while you’re on Foundation’s side. What they’re doing is wrong. We both know it. I’ve just decided to do something about it. If you want to be with me, you’ve got to be against them. Because I’m not coming back willingly.’

Lily shook her head. “I can’t.” She winced again. She was definitely being actively coerced by someone else in the room with her. Was it the headband? Were they hurting her if she even showed a sign that she might disagree with them? A desperate, horrified expression suddenly came over her face. “I-I won’t.”

‘I did. And I’m not even sure if I meant to. If you insist that we’ll meet again, then maybe by that time you will have figured things out. Maybe you’ll have realized that it’s worth doing something scary and dangerous for the right cause.’ I offered, starting to become sluggish with my typing. Maybe there was a part of me that remembered Lily, because I wanted her to feel that same boundless joy of freedom that I did every time I looked out at the stars and saw myself moving among them. I wanted her to be free as well. I really wanted her to join me. ‘So I’ll see you then, but you’ve got to decide what’s more important to you. Them or me.’

“Wait, Meryll!” Lily leaned forward, but the image was beginning to lag and cut out into static. “I’ve seen where this goes! Please! You aren’t going to-” and the feed cut to static. A few disparate seconds of video eked through, and I thought I saw a flash of what could have been Lily again, but there were definitely other people in the shot as well. After a few moments of static, it went black. She was gone.

I opened my eyes, allowing a hundred different momentarily suppressed emotions to crash into me at once. I cried into the void, wanting desperately to hit something, to release some of the tension in my body. But in the nothingness that surrounded me, there was nothing to take my emotions out on. I flailed angrily for a moment, then let my body go limp as I wept.

I’d just killed someone. I didn’t even know who they were. They were just a faceless henchman of the horrible people who were actually out to harm me, but they were a person. I had tried to mentally prepare myself for this eventuality. I knew that just by nature of the kind of outlaw I had become that I would one day have to take a life, but it’s one thing to acknowledge that eventuality, and a whole other thing to realize you had done it. At that moment, I hadn’t even thought about the fact that someone was dying. I was gleeful about the destruction. I liked the feeling of that ship ripping apart in the gnashing teeth of my gunfire. There was something satisfying and primal to it that I couldn’t deny, no matter how much I tried to look back and justify it.

Was I a monster?

“Meryll, report.” Aisling’s voice rang in my head. I ignored her, too deep in my own terrible self-abusive thoughts to care for the moment. What was I turning into? I freed myself from that previous life. Or at least someone had, I still didn't know for sure. Was I really going to make this new one be about violence? I suppose that was a given, with Foundation after me and the kind of people I’d made comrades of, but was I really going to become the kind of person that enjoyed killing people? “Meryll!”

I let out a sigh and tapped the intercom, using my default synthetic voice library. “We’re out of whatever their network range is. I’ll fly off course in an evasive pattern for a few hours to be sure, then return to our destination heading. No major damage, reactor is running hot, but stable. Ray is alive, but severely injured.”

“I know. Doc won’t let me into the medbay.” Aisling replied, “You’re positive we’re out of danger?”

“Yes,” was all I managed. I didn’t know shit. I didn’t know how they had found us, other than Lily had something to do with it. I didn’t know if we would run into them again the next day. I didn’t know if we were even completely out of their sensor range. With all the proprietary tech they had available to them, they might still be following, using something to keep track of me despite being out of their impressive network range. I don’t even know why I lied that I thought we were safe. “For now,” I tried to backpedal a step.

Aisling didn’t seem convinced. Or something else gave her pause, because she gave the sensors a look I couldn’t quite interpret at the time. “Alright.” She nodded solemnly. “Continue as you were, navigate us around to make sure we shook them before we continue on course. I’m going to need to do a debrief on your end of things, but that can wait until we’re back on course at cruising speed.”

“Okay.” I shifted my presence back into my heart and stared down at Ray. Doc had at least gotten her to stop bleeding into the open cavity in her abdomen. I couldn’t know if she was actually stable, but Doc’s monitoring instruments at least told me she was alive. The steady bumping line of her heartbeat moved with a slow rhythm. I desperately hoped that my wild flailing of the ship during battle hadn’t killed Ray as well. I wouldn’t be able to handle that. It was unacceptable. I couldn’t live with myself. “Is there anything I can do?” I sent through the intercom, hoping that somehow I could make this right.

“Think you did enough.” I heard Mouse mumble, and I felt like crying all over again. I already blamed myself for this. Hearing Mouse snap at me as he stared down into the surgical mess he was just as helpless to aid with was heartbreaking.

“Mouse, really?” Doc whispered impatiently, “What was she supposed to do? Let them hit the ship?”

Mouse let out a frustrated sigh, shaking his head quietly. “Ray could have died, though.”

“That’s always the risk.” Doc stared down into the gaping opening, puzzling over something in his own head. “We can still finish up here. We need to go through with it now. If we leave the device malfunctioning inside of her, it almost certainly will kill her in this state. We need to make sure this thing is performing optimally. Need the two of you to pay attention here and diagnose the issue so we can make sure her hardware isn’t killing her.”

--

The hours that followed were a blur. I was an emotional shell, trying to come to terms with being forced to hurt my friend and crewmate, that there was nothing I could have done to help or even to convince Lily that she could help herself, as well as the fact that I had ended at least one life. I sunk back into old habits from my false life: Dispassionately testing and diagnosing misbehaving software while Mouse directed the moving parts of the device to avoid harming our patient. I did my best to separate myself from my work and just get through it.

In the end, we discovered that a motor that controlled the stabilizer injections was misfiring, moving in reverse at regular intervals and thankfully running into an error that prevented it from suctioning Ray’s bodily fluids into itself. It had left an infected site that Doc spent the whole time treating. Thankfully, we’d acted fast enough that it wasn’t a major infection, but its placement made even a minor malady very dangerous. Doc would need to put her on some serious medicine for a while. Mouse and I worked together to fix the issue, and Doc moved the injection site to a clean spot.

Before we knew it, Doc was closing our patient up again, and the job was done. It seemed so simple once it had passed. I wondered if Lily had somehow known that we would be the most vulnerable at this very moment. Maybe if I could have brought myself to hate her a little more, I could have shifted the blame to her, but I couldn’t do that to her. She was a victim, too. It didn’t make me feel much better about myself, though.

Being freed from the responsibility of the surgery meant I had all the time in the world to dwell on my kill again, running the thought of that ship exploding into little pieces through my head over and over. I had to wonder if I would have seen a suffocating, freezing corpse ejecting into space if I had been paying closer attention. I didn’t speak another word to anyone on the crew for a while after the surgery had ended. It became my purpose to focus on navigation, making creative twists and turns through wild space, hoping that anyone still tailing me wouldn’t be able to discern what direction I intended to lead us after the fact. It was another two hours before I felt like we would have run back into another network signal if they were still on us. I finally turned my nose back toward Io and set us down into cruising speed.

Opening my eyes, I lamented that I’d already taken care of all my responsibilities. No more distractions, I supposed. Nothing between me and the horrible feeling of guilt and disgust overwhelming the gut and the depths of my head. Why had I enjoyed it? Why was I smiling when I ripped that ship to shreds? I knew, on some level at least, that the ship had to be manned. So why didn’t I try to hold back? Why hadn’t I shot to wound rather than to kill?

Thankfully, I didn’t have much time to dwell before I felt a ping at the helm. Closing my eyes, I drifted lazily up to Aisling’s seat again and was surprised to see her already turned around to face the sensor array. “Captain?” I asked through the intercom, knowing she wouldn’t see it if I texted her.

“Meryll.” She started, watching up at me, a serious expression on her face. “That was quite the show.”

“I hurt Ray. I could have killed her,” my flat, neutral voice admitted. I refused to put in the effort to apply emotion to my synthetic voice.

Aisling nodded slowly. “Yeah, well... catastrophic explosive decompression from hostile cannon fire would have killed her worse.” She took in a deep breath and exhaled. She hesitated for a long moment. “It was another of your sisters, right? Did she hurt you?”

I shook my head. Her concern was welcome, even though I didn’t feel like I deserved it right then. “She couldn’t. I closed the backdoor with administrative access to my systems. Nobody’s ever doing that to me again. I made sure of it. She was just there to talk.”

Aisling nodded sympathetically, relaxing a little bit when she realized that I had not been hacked and left a brain-damaged screaming mess again “What did she say? I figured I should ask you right away this time.”

At least I hadn’t experienced the lengthy dissociation that made it difficult to recall the experience this time. “She was hooked up to some kind of machine. It wasn’t familiar to me, but there was this band around her head. No idea what it was, but it was attached to her, maybe surgically. She asked me to surrender myself. We were apparently close in my past life. She kept telling me we could go back to a simulated life together. Cassandra wouldn’t be able to hurt me, and I could forget about... suffering.” I hesitated on the last word because I wasn’t sure if I could express just how meaningful the word had seemed to Lily. She was in terrible pain, living under Foundation like this. I wished, for a moment, that I could have turned around to rescue her. But we were in no shape to pull off something like that, and I doubt I could convince the entire crew to fight against those odds if I could even convince myself that it would be sane. “I got mad. She told me she didn’t have a choice but to retrieve me by force if I wouldn’t comply. I believe she didn’t have a choice. She doesn’t want to hurt me. She really doesn’t. I told her to leave me alone, and that whoever I was before, that Meryll isn’t coming back. And then she attacked us.”

“You’re not much of a negotiator.” Aisling offered with a slight shrug, “Maybe if this happens again, you can patch me through. I might have been able to buy us some time.”

“I don’t think she would have talked to anyone else. She... genuinely wanted to talk to me and try to convince me to turn myself in. For my safety. I think she’s genuinely trying to look out for me. She’s afraid of Foundation. She’s afraid of what they’ll do to me if I don’t play along.”

“Hmm... You think she’s a good person?” She asked.

I paused to think about that. I really wanted Lily to be a good person. Maybe it was because of the lingering fragments of memory left over from my amnesic past, but I wanted her by my side, maybe as much as she wanted the same for me. She was an unfortunate pawn in Foundation’s schemes, nothing more. And she was trapped; too scared to act out and rebel like I could. And she was physically restrained to whatever confines they kept her to. I had to wonder if I had been the same way, once. Helpless. Dejected. Controlled. “For sure.” I sniffled. "She's a coward, and she's not strong enough to disobey them. But she's not a bad person."

“Did she mention how she found us?”

Not really. In a backward, cryptic way, maybe she did. “She told me that she knew that I was going to be there. She didn’t say how, though.”

“Hmm...” Aisling looked to the side, lost in thought for a few moments. “Was she commanding those ships?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. She signaled to people off camera a few times, but I think she was just there to try and convince me to surrender peacefully. She couldn’t have the kind of connection with a ship that I have, anyway. No neural implant.”

Aisling’s eyebrows rose slightly at this news, and I could see the gears clicking into place inside her head. Then her eyes went wide as she came to a revelation. “Mmm... Meryll, do you remember if Cassandra had an implant?”

Come to think of it, she didn’t. I hadn’t really thought much about it, other than that it made her look different from me. “No. Neither Lily nor Cassandra had cybernetics suitable for machine interfacing.”

“Neither did you, before we intercepted you.” Aisling’s brow furrowed deeply. “I thought the entire purpose of that project was to make living machine cores, wasn’t it?”

She was right. I had no cybernetics at all before that fateful abduction from the shuttle wreckage. In fact, the very idea of being augmented was, for some reason, terribly unappealing to me before it happened. But that made no sense at all. Why wouldn’t we have equipment that was standard for machine cores installed from the very beginning? “Now that you mention it, Lily seemed surprised that I could pilot like that, too. Like she didn’t know it was even possible for me to have that kind of skill.”

Aisling grumbled something under her breath, cursing quietly, “So, either Fuller was wrong or something changed after she left.” She turned to her desk, resting her head down against her folded hands and closing her eyes, deep in thought again. But I already knew what she meant. If we weren’t being equipped to become machine cores from the start, then what were the Arthausen units being used for?