03: Altered Present Moments

Routines flex easily to accommodate an additional person. It’s the last day before the tunnel strands them — the last day before they’re stuck on Elysium-4 for the next forty days, the last day Selene can reconsider her plan to keep the prime suspect confined with her. Asphodel and Brutus are sitting at the table as Selene puts the dishes and cutlery away. Scrubbing brushes kick on inside the cubbyholes, removing melted cheese and other evidence of today’s breakfast.

“I don’t really have any suggestions.” Asphodel shrugs. “Maybe it was a bit too salty?”

“Hey, there we go, Brutus! Some feedback,” Selene says, sitting back down. She can’t tell if it’s a trick of the light — if the algae are simply fluorescing more today — but Asphodel looks a little less sickly, a little more radiant, like a flower that’s finally getting rain.

Brutus simply nods. “Thank you, Asphodel.” Selene isn’t sure why he’s continuing to ask for feedback like this. Whatever purpose it initially served, she suspects that he’s continuing it just to have someone compliment his cooking. She winces slightly.

It’s not long before they’re sitting in front of the window again. The sunset functions like a fireplace would centuries prior: it’s something to look at other than your interlocutors. Today its flame is low on the horizon, a low ember burning the tops of the arboreal fungi.

“How do you occupy your time, stuck on uninhabited planets like these?” Asphodel’s adjusting her seating position, brows furrowed slightly. She’s wearing more of Selene’s dress clothes; they fit her just as poorly as the previous ones. “It seems mind-numbing.”

“Sometimes there’s enough work to keep me busy,” Selene says. There is this time; she’s not relishing the thought of searching through all that mail. “Otherwise, we find ways.”

“I have accumulated a cache of papers and novels and other such materials,” Brutus says. “If I titrate my attention, a dozen books keep enough segments of my awareness occupied for a day or so.”

Asphodel’s face scrunches up further. “Okay, but what do you expect me to do here? Do you expect me to help you find THRONE?”

Selene opens her mouth, but Brutus jumps in first. “That will not be necessary. You are a guest here, after all. You are welcome to any of the materials in my library. I believe Selene has a reading tablet in her desk.”

In her room, rummaging through drawers for something she forgot she had, Selene says, “It could’ve been useful to have her help.”

“That is an unacceptably risky idea.”

“If she isn’t THRONE, we get another perspective,” she says, pulling a tablet out from underneath a pile of miscellaneous devices — a toxin analysis probe, a steno board, a two-way earpiece — the majority of which she intends to repair at some point. “If she is THRONE, she might say something useful.”

“In the unlikely event she is not THRONE, you are enlisting a civilian to do your job for you,” Brutus says. His avatar is standing in front of the door. He’s gone to the effort of lowering his eyebrows, crossing his arms over his chest. “If she is, she will almost immediately realize you suspect her, and she will cut your throat in your sleep.”

Standing with Brutus between her and the exit is intimidating despite the fact he’s a dozen centimeters shorter and his visible form is just triangles etched into the air. “I lock my door.” She realizes the obvious objection — ‘so did the scientists’ — after she says it.

“I am uncomfortable with you putting yourself in danger for such little gain.” His voice is lowered, tinged with emotion — he’s devoted a not insignificant amount of computing power to modulating it effectively. It hits Selene that he really means this.

She can’t look him in the eye. It’s a couple moments before she can bring herself to respond. “Okay. I won’t.”

Back out in the living room, Selene hands her the tablet. “It should still work. It can send mail, too, so you don’t have to use my terminal.” And she doesn’t have to keep turning the brightness back up every time they switch off.

Asphodel experimentally presses a couple keys. The display turns on, and she turns away as though blinded. It takes a couple seconds of squinting sideways at the screen for her to dim the lights to something she can bear to look at. She turns to Selene, still blinking. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” She looks out the window before glancing up at Brutus, who’s taken his normal immobile station behind her seat. There’s no evidence of any previous conflict on his face. “She can still send mail without the tunnel, right?”

He nods. “There is a data relay in orbit around this planet. Your messages will be stored until the relay can connect to the recipient.” It’s been years and she’s still not used to the way the Coalition leaves infrastructure strewn around so casually. If she worked in resource allocation, she’s sure the thought of putting an orbital relay around some distant planet with a population of less than a dozen researchers would make her queasy.

Her train of thought is interrupted by Asphodel typing, keystrokes like the simultaneous footfalls of a quartet of dancers. She’s curled up in the chair, tablet perched on her lap, staring at the screen she’s tilted backward. She doesn’t say anything when Selene leaves.

Skimming through the newly-decrypted user registry, Selene notices humans are outnumbered three to one by combat drones. From the photographs she recognizes the one from the stairwell, already in disrepair.

“I believe they made profiles for the drones due to a quirk of the networking architecture,” Brutus says, preempting the question she had just opened her mouth to ask.

“Do you think they were intelligent?”

“I cannot be certain now that they have been disassembled,” he says, the word sounding like a euphemism even in his monotone, “but judging from their construction they cannot have been higher than Canid-class.”

The sapience of artificial intelligences is ranked on a scale from Thread-class, roughly equivalent to a flatworm, to Upright-class, roughly equivalent to a human. The handful of news feeds she still follows will, on uneventful days, frequently report on talks held to rename Upright-class to something that doesn’t assume bipedalism. These talks stretch back decades to a few years after first contact; they have yet to bear any fruit.

“And they still took pictures of them? That’s almost cute,” she says, paging through the users’ details, coming to a stop when she sees a familiar name: Minerva Verrine. “Huh. Guess she’s real.”

“This changes the calculus.”

The woman in the photograph is drawn, austere. She’s not smiling. Nobody in these pictures has been, but it seems most natural for her. This effect is amplified by her dark glasses, worn despite her clearly being indoors. The only resemblance between her and her younger sister is the auburn color of her hair.

“You’d think that if THRONE was lying about being her sister, it’d choose a form that looks more like her.” She leans back, looking up at the ceiling.

“Perhaps it had not settled on a cover story when it chose its human disguise,” he says. “It is also possible it anticipated that too much of a resemblance would be suspicious.”

Selene shoots him a look. He doesn’t react. “I don’t think it was on that level of metacognition, Brutus.”

“The dossier specified that it is extremely intelligent. It may very well be planning that far ahead.”

“I know it’s intelligent, I just don’t think that much subterfuge would’ve felt necessary to it.”

“That mindset is why you so often lose when we play chess.” Once again she opens her mouth to speak; once again she is preempted. “Directness is valuable, but it is entirely plausible THRONE thought its cover would be made more believable by imperfections. Given your assessment of Asphodel’s story and her resemblance to her supposed sister, it would have been correct to do so.”

She leans forward again. “I guess you have a point.”

Ignoring the drones, there are six users total: Halifax Stephenson, Daniel Young, Ivan Burroughs, Fletcher Hayward, Eugene Newman, and Minerva Verrine. She recognizes Young and Newman. Even if the body on the stairs wasn’t really Stephenson, it was a dead ringer for the photograph on file. The partially devoured body was wearing a gas mask, but looking at Burroughs’ picture she recognizes the corpse’s eyes. The other two — Hayward and Verrine — she’s never seen before.

There’s a knock at the door, and her train of thought derails. It’s Asphodel.

“Sorry, did I interrupt something?”

Selene waves her off. “It’s fine. What’d you need?”

As soon as she moves to let her in, Asphodel goes to Selene’s dresser and starts searching through it. “Clothes that fit.”

“I do not think you will find anything more suitable during your second search,” Brutus says.

“It’s worth a shot.” She pulls a shirt out of the drawer and holds it up to her torso. After a moment’s contemplation she folds it and puts it back. “Maybe not.” She sighs, hand on her chin, brow furrowed. “You don’t have guest clothes? No exes or flings that left stuff behind?”

“No, neither. Don’t really have any exes.”

Asphodel’s eyes flit between the person and the hologram in the room. “That tracks.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” A moment’s pause. “I hate to be a bother about this, but—”

Selene waves off the apologetic preface. “You can order some clothes. I’ll pay for it.”

“Thank you, I’m sorry for the trouble—”

“No need for the apologies. It’s the least we can do.”

“You should be able to make purchases from your tablet,” Brutus says. “If you order quickly, it should arrive before we are isolated.”

She does, and it’s less than four hours before the tablet lights up with a request to open the airlock, accompanied by a stylized depiction of a delivery drone with cameras its closed in an imitation of smiling eyes. “It says to open the airlock.”

Brutus nods in response — Selene knows he’ll have triple-checked the message’s signature for legitimacy — and the airlock opens. An automated courier drone floats in, only moderately less cute than its portrait, accompanied by a halo of cameras. The drone’s front unfolds, grotesque like a cat yawning, and out slides a series of packages barely recognizable as clothing, compressed and trussed up with twine. The bundles land ambivalently on the carpet. Asphodel looks at the drone with an expression Selene can’t read, hand outstretched like she’s either going to give the drone a pat on the head-analogue or grab it and smash it against the wall.

She does neither. The airlock closes behind it with a quiet hiss. She takes the clothes and goes to the guest room. It’s not long before Selene hears her voice again. “They don’t fit.”

She looks up at her guest, takes a moment to register what she’s seeing, and averts her gaze. Asphodel’s in her underwear, practical garments that still evoke the flesh. The curve of her hips is burned into her eyes like an unbidden daydream, like having stared into the sun. “Do you mind?” The levelness of her voice briefly surprises her. Training herself into professionalism has its uses.

“What are you—?” Asphodel sighs. “Fine, whatever.”

It’s not long before she’s back in Selene’s formalwear, holding a dress up to her torso. She wasn’t lying; it’d be a tight fit under the best of circumstances. It’s the sort of fit associated with fancy clothing for extremely formal functions of the sort Selene does her best not to attend. As casual wear, it’s not fit for purpose.

Asphodel says as much. “I’m sorry for the trouble, but do you think I could order a replacement?”

Brutus shakes his head, an uncommon gesture for him when he has to use up cycles rendering the motion of his hair. “We have less than two hours before we lose contact. That is not enough time for a second delivery.” Selene doesn’t let her relief show; a single delivery is fine, but two would eat into her scrip budget more than she would be comfortable with.

Dress still held up to her torso, Asphodel frowns, looking down at it, then up at Selene. “You have to have one of those medical robot arms, right? Can it do stitches?”

Selene looks at Brutus, who says, “Yes, I should be able to re-tailor your clothes for you.”

It’s slow work. The machine folds down from the wall, a blockage in the arterial space of the hallway. A scalpel performs adequately at a task it was never meant for, and a needle threads surgical-grade stitches through seams. He must be researching the principles of garment tailoring as he goes, extrapolating Asphodel’s measurements from the camera feeds. He’s stopped rendering his avatar or responding to questions. Whatever his method is, it’s demanding.

Selene exits her room after a brief report to her superiors and colleagues in the Blades — no survivors found, no sign of THRONE, will continue to search — to find Asphodel sitting on the floor, watching a triumph of medical science alter a dress. Selene sits down next to her.

They watch the cutting and stitching heads engage in their careful dance for a couple minutes before Asphodel breaks the silence. “Thanks again for the clothes.” A brief pause. “The delivery was probably expensive.”

It was. “You don’t have to thank me.”

Silence overtakes them again. The carpet is soft, and the quiet rustle of fabric is soothing. Selene can tell she’d be in danger of dozing off if she was still capable of getting drowsy. Still, it’s nice.

“Why did that delivery robot look like that?” Once again Asphodel interrupts the quiet. “All the cameras were off-putting.”

“They need good peripheral vision so they don’t run into stuff.”

“That makes sense.” Then, “Wait, how do you know that?”

“Brutus used to pilot one.” It was years ago, back when they were first getting started together, back when they needed the scrip and would cut to the bone to save it. “They’re all piloted by AI. The delivery company avoids liability in a crash and the AI gets paid.”

“What would a robot need money for?”

“Computing time is expensive.”

Conversation is interrupted when the dress is finished and Asphodel has to put another garment on the table. After she sits back down, she asks, “Does Brutus earn his keep?”

“It’s not like that.”

“Computing time is expensive, right?”

“He’s not my employee. We’re partners.”

There’s a look on her face Selene doesn’t know what to do with — a half-suppressed grimace, maybe — but she doesn’t say anything else.

After an indeterminate while longer of watching a robot tailor at work, Selene stands. “I’ve got more work to do.” Maybe she’ll find Minerva’s original report on THRONE. Hopefully it’ll have that cave’s coordinates in it. “Let me know when you want dinner.”

“Yeah, sure.”

It’s three days after their isolation began, and Selene is once again at her desk. Reading through the decrypted mail is less enlightening than she had hoped. For every useful piece of information, there’s a couple dozen bits of office gossip, complaints about the food printer quality, denied requests for vacation time. She sighs, stretches, rubs her eyes. The information’s turning to mush in her head. She’s about to call it a night when she looks back at the screen, realizes what it’s about, pages back to read from the start.

It’s between Minerva and Stephenson. The start of the correspondence hasn’t been decrypted yet. The first link in the chain she has access to is Minerva suggesting numerous methods for keeping THRONE in line even if they let it out of the enclosure. It’s a thorough list; half of them are technologies Selene’s never heard of. It ends with her asserting it’s inhumane to keep something so large confined to such a small space and a signature, “MPV.”

The response fits on a single screen. “Absolutely not. You’re talking like one of those Telly cultists.” She can feel the bile rising in her throat. She imagines THRONE, three meters tall, stuck in that tiny enclosure. She thinks back to Stephenson lying dead on the stairs. It’s a satisfying image.

The bile stays with her. She’s still wide awake and resentful when it’s time to sleep and her consciousness is flipped off like a light.

It’s dinner, five nights after their isolation began. The steaks on their plates ooze red just like the real thing. Brutus is explaining the process by which he modulates the steak’s recipe file to make it rarer or more well done. Most of it goes over Selene’s head — this wasn’t her department even when she was more academically minded — but Asphodel seems to be enjoying the conversation, nodding along. Selene isn’t paying much attention to the words, just watching the conversation, the clipped head tilts Brutus makes, the way Asphodel’s mouth moves, other such things. It’s comfortable, like the sound of crickets or rain outside.

Asphodel gestures, knife in hand. “I’m surprised you thought to try that. I guess you have a lot of time to iterate, confined to the ship together so often.”

Selene’s about to ask how she got into culinary engineering when she fumbles. The knife slips from Asphodel’s grip, and she contorts herself to try and catch it. Her reflexes are impressive, but her accuracy is not; she catches it by the blade, which digs in. She drops it on reflex, and the knife clatters to the floor. She flinches at the noise but regards her bleeding hand with a blank expression Selene can only read as boredom, or perhaps confusion.

She’s off to the bathroom before she fully realizes it, grabs a roll of bandages and disinfectant after a moment’s hasty searching, returns to find Asphodel continuing to examine her hand with that same look on her face. She looks up when Selene takes a hold of her hand.

“What? It’s nothing, you don’t have to—”

She waves her off. It’s not that bad a cut, but still needs bandaging. Asphodel doesn’t pull back as Selene sprays the cut with stinging antiseptic and begins to wind the bandage around her palm. The blood stains the green-blue fabric crimson. When her work is done, Selene steps back; Asphodel flexes her hand.

“Thanks,” she says, then, “It’s sticky.”

“Yeah, it’s got some kind of salve on it. It promotes healing.” She stoops down to pick up the knife, wipes blood off the tile. “Make sure you don’t use that hand too much while it heals.” The knife goes into its slot easily; the cleaning system can handle blood just as well as food residue.

“Yeah, okay,” she replies, reaching over the table to take Selene’s knife. She’s not meeting her eyes. She resumes eating, knife and fork having swapped hands.

The rest of dinner is uneventful, and it’s now past the point in the ship’s circadian processes when the lights dim in artificial dusk. Selene sits at her terminal, paging through the user registry again. The glare of her screen the only light in the room. She cycles through names and photographs on repeat. Stephenson. Young. Burroughs. Hayward. Newman. Verrine.

“Young’s body was in the server room. Newman’s was in the security room. Stephenson was on the stairs to the kitchen. I’m pretty sure Burroughs was the one who got partially devoured.” She’s muttering under her breath, counting on her fingers as she goes, voice building up to normal speaking tone. “That leaves two bodies we can’t identify: whoever got their head slammed into the wall, and whoever was in the elevator. One could be Minerva and the other could be Hayward. Then we’d have six people here and six corpses, and everything would line up.” She turns to Brutus. “That’s the obvious thing to think, right?”

“I was under the impression you agreed that Stephenson’s body was THRONE in disguise.”

“Right, exactly, so we have one person unaccounted for. Maybe the real Stephenson’s body is in the enclosure. Maybe somebody got out.”

“You are forgetting something.” She can’t help but read his blank expression as disappointment. “It is possible there were two people in the elevator.”

A deep exhale. “That’s true.”

There’s quiet for a few seconds before he says, “I apologize.”

“No, you’re right.” She stands up and stretches; her back pops, and a brief ripple of numbness radiates out from her spinal implant. “It’s definitely possible.” She spends a few seconds mentally repairing the elevator, unfolding it like origami to see if two people could fit, before dismissing that line of inquiry. She takes her nightly slate of pills and climbs the ladder up to her bed.

Blankets weighing down on her, staring up at the ceiling, she asks, “Brutus?”

“Yes, Selene?”

“Thanks for all the work you do around here. I really appreciate it.”

It’s a moment before he responds. “You are welcome.” He sounds like he means it.

And then she’s asleep.

It’s not long before half-lucid awareness reemerges. The sky outside the front window is black, dotted with stars, the galaxy’s arm smeared over it with insulting beauty. The vehicle’s headlights and scattered lamps are the only exterior illumination; they cast harsh shadows on the dusty gray terrain. A crater-pockmarked childhood home, for some definition of home. The air is stale and stinks of violence, the gunpowder reek of a vacuum baptism. The seat’s fabric is coarse, decades worth of dust ground into it. Overdue for a cleaning.

There’s someone in the passenger seat. The rover never had a passenger seat. This is somewhere else. Imitation leather seats, imitation blue sky, imitation asphalt under the tires. The sun catches hair dyed gray; his roots are white. Two people sitting in the backseat of an imitation relic. The electric engine rumbles, baritone like his voice, artificial like his sentiments. Goosebumps, cologne that smells like a bad idea, stifled moans like an unfulfilled fantasy. His hand — bandaged around the palm — tangles in loose hair. His mouth tastes like shrapnel, ashes, someone else’s restaurant order. The carpeted floor is rough against exposed skin. Overdue for a cleaning.

The clock-forced awakening is a mercy. She blinks.

She’s talking before she’s fully pieced herself together. “Does the medisynth have anything that’ll keep me from dreaming?”

“I can add anti-oneirics to your medication regimen,” Brutus says. “Did you have a nightmare? I noticed your vitals were elevated for most of the night.”

“Something like that.”