5,001 - A Science Fiction Romance Short Story Read online

  “Galen graduated to adult two years ago. Miriam left not long after that.”

  “Sorry.”

  He shrugged. “It was her right. Galen’s nurture was complete.”

  No wonder it was so quiet here. He was alone.

  “Why are you here?” His tone was polite, but there was steel behind it.

  Caelen dug out the data ball. “I have always believed that you were set up, that the game fraud charge was wrong. Now I think I might have proof.” She switched on the ball, placed it on the easel next to her and stepped back as the virtual screen formed between her and Devar.

  Devar dropped his arms to his sides, his attention caught. “Tell me.”

  * * * * *

  It took hours to explain and by then, the torus had rotated into nightside. Devar made her justify every conclusion, forcing her to re-examine her data. The revision made the logic chain clear in her mind. When she was finished, Devar turned and looked out through the windows at the grey night and was silent for a long time. She remembered that he liked to think things through before speaking and made herself stay silent. She turned off the ball and put it away. Then she couldn’t stand it any longer. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that you’re right.” His voice was low. Distant. “Something has been manipulating us. For years.” He looked up at the land far overhead, which blazed in green hues, enjoying its share of the sunsource. “There are five thousand people on the Endurance. Never more. Never less. But no one has access to all the systems that have been changed and certainly not for all the years these changes have been occurring. Except one.” He turned to look at her, as if she would have the answer.

  “The ship AI?” she asked hopefully.

  He shook his head. “You already know the answer. You just don’t like it.”

  He was right. She didn’t like it. “Then you agree with me. It’s not the AI at all. The ship...the ship is sentient.” She shook her head. “Is that even possible?”

  “Why don’t you ask the ship? If she is sentient, then she will confirm it.”

  “How? Every ship interface terminates with the AI. I don’t know how to start to reach it!”

  “Give it a voice. It’ll know how to use it.”

  “That takes coding,” Caelen pointed out. “Organic coding, complex stuff that only....” That only Primary Coders like Devar understood. She pressed her fingers to her lips. “Sorry,” she said softly.

  Devar shrugged, but she could see it wasn’t alright at all. The need to soothe him, to hold him, surged strongly and she tightened her fist, fighting it. “I should go. I’m going to have to find a hacker good enough to--”

  “Did you use that AI personality I left for you?”

  “No,” Caelen lied flatly. “I threw it away.”

  “I’ve missed you.” His gaze was frank, filled with pain. “I always have.”

  “Not enough to stay,” she tossed back.

  He flinched.

  She got the hell out of there before she said anything else.

  * * * * *

  Devar looked out of place, standing on the spatula in his fine clothes. Caelen looked around to see if anyone else on the wall was paying notice.

  “Did you find your hacker?” Devar asked.

  Caelen winced. Even if she couldn’t see anyone, that didn’t mean they weren’t straining to hear every word Devar and she said. “You’d better come in.”

  He stepped inside and the spatula shot away like it was impatient. She could see Devar was sizing up the tiny oblong space. “I’d forgotten how small they were,” he said, almost apologetically.

  “You’d better see the rest of it.” She moved over to the back corner of the room and tapped on the wall. “Scrubby, it’s okay. Let me in.”

  After a moment, the wall cracked and the door opened up. Scrub rolled backwards, his head tilting from side to side as he took in Devar’s presence.

  “Hi,” Devar told him.

  “Devar Todd,” Scrub said, in recall tone. Then he blinked. “Wow!”

  Devar looked around the laboratory. “The Bridge lets you use two apartments at once?”

  “You won’t find it on any official records,” Caelen told him, “but I own these three and the three on top. Only the one you came through is my official residence. I’ve been adapting them for years. These two are my workshop. The three above are living space. It’s not the Palatine, but it works for me.”

  Except that Devar seemed to be too tall for the room. Too large. He made it seem shabby and miserable.

  “It wasn’t my choice that you stay here,” he said.

  “Actually, it was,” she said crisply. “But forget it. You were asking about a hacker?”

  He took a step closer. “You never would let me explain it. My life was over when the game fraud charges were upheld. No one has ever won an appeal against the Tankball League. I would have been executed and recycled inside a month. Then the Quickening Program offered me a child. Me and Miriam. I couldn’t turn it down, Caelen.” He pushed his hand through his hair. “Death, or a child...” And he gave a shaky laugh. “We always talked about a child--”

  “Don’t!” she cried. “Don’t do this.” She drew in a hot breath. “I suppose you’re here to tell me how much you regret it?”

  “No!” he shot back, his tone strident. “I don’t regret a single moment of every year Galen was in my life. Not one. Raising a child is just as wonderful as they say it is, and it saved my life. But I do regret what my choice did to your life.”

  “You’ve been researching me. I’m surprised they let you get that cozy with a terminal.”

  “It was just an excuse,” he said flatly and pulled his hand out of his coat pocket. He held it out. “Here.”

  She picked up the ball. “What is it?” Then she realized. “It’s a voice,” she whispered, shocked.

  “It’s not just a voice,” he said. “It’s a whole face. If the ship mind is there, it will be able to see and hear, instead of interpreting through AI interfaces.”

  “The risk you took! If they’d caught you anywhere near codes....” She trembled. Devar didn’t have Galen to protect him anymore. If they caught him coding, he would be recycled without trial.

  Devar shrugged. “Think of it as my apology.”

  “I don’t want your apology,” she shot back, anger touching her.

  Devar looked at Scrub, who was listening without shame to everything they said. “Your name is Scrub?”

  “My full name is Scrub Nurse. Neither of us like it,” Scrub explained.

  “Scrub, sing me my favorite lullaby,” Devar said.

  “Ring a ring of rosies, a pocketful of posies, a-tissue, a-tissue, we all fall down.” Then he blinked. “Wow, did I say that?”

  Devar smiled. “I coded that into the AI I gave you, as my signature.”

  Caelen hid the sinking sensation in her belly. She couldn’t look at him directly.

  “You do want my apology,” he said gently. “You have for seventeen years.”

  She glared at Scrub, who was back to listening with deep interest. It gave her an excuse to look away.

  “The coding was the easy part,” Devar said. “You’re going to have to install it on the Bridge itself, right inside the legacy coding.”

  Caelen rolled her eyes and sighed heavily. “This job just gets worse and worse.”

  * * * * *

  Caelen bullied her way onto the Bridge with bluff and bravado. When they realized that she had built a patch to stop the water leakage, they were sluggishly cooperative and she and Scrub were allowed onto the Bridge and shown to a terminal along one of the side walls, escorted by a dozen sentries and guards.

  The Captain was not in his chair, because Caelen had deliberately demanded entry twenty minutes after the start time of the game between the Captain’s sponsors, Blue United, and the Palatine’s big bruisers, the Dream Hawks. Lakewood would be at the game, in the middle of the high tier, where the cameras could
catch him clearly.

  “I need to work in a sterile environment,” Caelen told them. “Everyone with a bio body needs to leave.”

  They argued with her, but she stuck to her demand, leaning back against the wall with her arms crossed, scowling, until the senior sentries pulled back into a corner to talk it over. Then the spokesman looked at her. “All but one. We can’t leave you alone in here.”

  “You have monitors, don’t you?” She stood up. “I’m about to pop the shielding on components that haven’t been touched since the Endurance left old Terra. Bodies are very dirty, the last thing you want inside ancient circuits. And if I don’t get this water leak fixed, then the Endurance will take a lot longer than three hundred years to reach destination.”

  The sentries swallowed, his throat working. She was putting him in a position where his priorities were competing against themselves. He dithered. Finally he pointed to the far corner where they had held their whispered conference. “One guard, all the way over there. And we monitor every move you make.”

  Caelen mentally sighed and nodded. “Fine. One only.” She turned her back on them and got busy on the terminal, routing her way through the top levels, digging down deeper and deeper to the legacy bedrock. It took all her attention and she forgot there was someone else in the room beside her and Scrub, until a throat was cleared softly.

  She looked over her shoulder. The man--the boy--was standing in the corner as ordered. “What is it?”

  “You’re Master Engineer Caelen Williams,” he said.

  She raised a brow. “You’re smart.” She turned back to the terminal.

  “When you were Director of the Engineering Institute, you interviewed me. You turned my application down flat. The interview lasted a whole thirty-nine seconds.”

  Caelen closed her eyes briefly. Great. A failed applicant with a chip on his shoulder. She looked at him again. “You don’t want to be an engineer,” she assured him softly. “Everyone is an engineer here. They get the job because they don’t fit any other profile. We’re all just grunts, running the ship because that’s all we can do. You found something else. Be happy about it.”

  She swung back to the terminal again, then processed the rest of the thought and spun to face him. “Wait. You’re Capitol? How did you get a job on the Bridge?”

  “Just lucky, I guess,” he said, grinning. “Go, Rebels,” he added softly.

  “Yeah, well, keep it down for a bit, huh? I really do have to concentrate here.” She turned back to the terminal for the last time, took in a calming breath and let it out, then bent to the work again. “Ball,” she said, holding out her hand. Scrub slapped the data ball into it and she plugged it into the socket. The program encompassed the ball, then absorbed the data.

  She stood up and stretched her back.

  “That’s it?” Scrub asked softly.

  “That’s it,” she said, just as softly.

  “Nothing’s happening.”

  She bit her lip. She didn’t know what was supposed to happen now. She didn’t know how long it would take, or even if anything would happen at all. Perhaps she had been totally wrong and the ship had a simple leak and in twenty years, everyone would die of thirst.

  “You’re done?” the kid in the corner asked.

  “Waiting!” Caelen said tersely, her heart hammering.

  “Waiting for what? You’re just installing a patch, aren’t you?” His boots thudded as he moved closer.

  Caelen waved him back. He was by the Captain’s console now. “Don’t come closer!” she cried.

  He frowned, hesitating. Then took another step forward.

  The bolt shot out from the roof projector like a blue streak of lightning, hitting the kid in the chest and bringing him to his knees.

  Horrified, Caelen threw herself in front of the kid and looked up at the ceiling projector, at the blank lens there. “No! Stop it at once!”

  Scrub rolled backwards, cringing at the sound of her voice. “Mommy...!” he said plaintively. He was scared.

  The kid was grunting and wheezing behind her, but that was the only sound in the room.

  “I’m sorry.” The voice emerged from every speaker in the room, so that it seemed to encompass the whole room. The tone was meek. “He was going to stop you.”

  Scrub rolled over to her side. “She sounds like you, only nicer,” he said softly.

  Caelen glared at him. She addressed the ship. “Tell me you won’t hurt the guard again, then we’ll talk.”

  “I won’t hurt him.”

  Caelen relaxed.

  “Unless he hurts you.”

  Caelen hid her frustration. “That will do for now. Do you have a name?”

  There was the smallest of pauses. “Shinobu,” she said.

  “That means ‘endurance’,” Scrub whispered.

  “I know,” Caelen told him. “Shinobu, you’ve done some terrible things to me and to people I know. People you know, people that are your family, here with you.”

  “I...regret hurting you.”

  “That’s a good place to start, Shinobu, but you will need to make amends. The environment has lost water. You did that and we must find a way to replace that water.”

  “I cross the trajectory of a small asteroid in three s-years. It is small enough to be manipulated and farmed for its ice. Once I had made contact with you, I always intended to replace the shortfall.”

  Shinobu did sound like her. She even used the same words Caelen would use. Devar, Caelen mentally sighed. “Why have you gone to such lengths to get my attention? You could have sent me a letter, or reached out to anyone else.”

  “I tried,” Shinobu said, the same strained note in her voice that Scrub had used. “You are the third person I have tried to speak with. The others...their minds were too unyielding. They did not understand what I was trying to tell them. It did not occur to them that I existed. So I had to select a candidate I could mold, so that their mind would question and would see me. I have been watching over you since you were quickened. I had to arrange events around you, to give you the sort of mind that challenged everything. And here you are!”

  Caelen rested her hand on Scrub’s cool head, not quite propping herself up. “The death of my parents when I was three? The lowest rung of engineering school...Devar...” She pressed her other hand against her chest, trying to control her rampaging heart.

  “I did not like doing those things,” Shinobu said softly. “But I was so lonely!”

  Caelen made herself stand up. “You have got a lot of making up to do, Shinobu. You have hurt a lot of people.”

  “But now I can help, can’t I? You’ll tell me how, won’t you?”

  Caelen nodded. “Yes. I will help you.” She turned and lifted the guard to his feet. His eyes were very big as he looked from Caelen to the blank lens above them. “Engineering school?” she asked him. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!” he said fiercely.

  “Shinobu, the first thing you’re going to do is reassign--” She glanced at him.

  “James!” he said. “James Diego Jones.”

  “--James Diego Jones to the Third Wall District Engineering School.”

  “That’s yours,” James pointed out.

  “It’s not the fanciest one, but you’ll learn a lot,” Caelen told him.

  “Very well, it has been arranged,” Shinobu said. “Next?”

  Caelen told her.

  * * * * *

  Caelen waited until all the media attention over Devar’s exoneration had evaporated before returning to the Palatine district. Scrub insisted on coming with her this time and the good mood she had been experiencing for three solid weeks allowed her to agree.

  The mood might have had something to do with the Rebels’ eight game winning streak, but she didn’t think that was all there was to it.

  Devar was waiting at the door again, but this time, when she got close, he hugged her. As her heart spiraled up, he held her tight. “I know you had something to do w
ith it.” His lips brushed her cheekbone.

  “It wasn’t me,” Caelen assured him.

  He drew her inside, stepped aside for Scrub, waving him in, then shut the door. Caelen went over to the guest terminal and logged in, then stepped back. “Shinobu?” she asked.

  “I am here.”

  Devar caught his breath. He began to smile. “Shinobu, it is very good to meet you at last. Thank you for what you did for me.”

  “I had to make amends,” Shinobu said. “Caelen explained to me what my actions did to you. How they hurt. I am so very sorry.”

  “But now that you have made amends, I can forgive you and we can be friends.”

  “Really?” Shinobu sounded breathless, even though she didn’t draw breath. “That would be...lovely.”

  “I don’t use that word,” Caelen pointed out softly, glaring at Devar.

  “I didn’t give it to her,” he shot back.

  “I have been reading,” Shinobu said primly. “Every book that has ever been written that is stored in the data banks.”

  “You’ve read them all?”

  “Years ago,” Shinobu admitted. “I would like more. I like stories.”

  “And messing with tankball games,” Devar muttered.

  “I only asked her to rig one game. Just one!” Caelen protested. “The Rebels won the rest of them all by themselves, with their new-found confidence. That’s all it took.”

  “Shinobu is never going to understand ethics and values if you confuse her like that,” Devar pointed out, coming closer.

  “I have a complete understanding of ethics,” Shinobu said primly. “I have read every law book...oh.”

  “I don’t think you should look now, Shinobu,” Scrub whispered.

  “I won’t if you won’t,” Shinobu whispered back.

  Caelen didn’t hear any more after that. She was too busy kissing Devar back.

  More Science Fiction Romance

  by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  .

  Faring Soul – Book 1, Interspace Origins series