Polaris Sector, Battleship Singularity

Admiral Gives made his way deep into the ship’s bow, wishing that meeting hadn’t taken him away. The damn businessman had caused that to take far longer than it should have. He had been forced to sit there, enduring the ghost’s cries, feeling her pain.

But now, now he was free to help her, just as he’d promised he would, so he headed to a compartment that was their secret. There, he would give her as much time as she needed, because he needed her just as much as she needed him right now.

The refugee fleet was in the midst of a supply crisis, Ariea was in the center of a coup and the Frontier was being pushed toward another civil war. If the Singularity was to survive any of that, he needed the ghost in a cohesive state. But it went beyond that, too. They were friends, and it was his job to hold her together when she fell apart. When he had needed it, she had done the same.

He found himself in a secluded area of the ship, a rarely visited corridor that looked the same as all the rest. It was near the top of the bow, but deep enough to avoid damage from anything short of a railgun impact or total structural collapse. The compartments nearby were all rarely visited long-term storage compartments. They were so rarely visited, in fact, that he doubted the supply officers even knew what was up here anymore. A lot of it was outdated or specialty equipment that never saw use, stored here because many of the crew didn’t like passing this way. They claimed it was weird or haunted, that something about this corridor just felt wrong.

They were right, of course. There was something different about this corridor, something that registered uneasily to human perception. While it looked the same as all the other corridors, if one went still, still enough to listen to the easy breath of the air filtration systems, here it didn’t sound so effortless. It came as a constricted rasp, another barely perceivable sound beneath it: the slither of something alive, the whisper of movement where there should have been none.

Behind the bulkheads, within the channels and spaces that ran wires, in this corridor alone, there were thousands, perhaps even millions of translucent white tendrils. Neurofibers. From here they spread outward to every system on the ship without exception. They fed on the ship’s electricity, taking fractional draws to grow and power the Black Box, which sat in a sealed, unmarked compartment in front of where the Admiral now stood.

Carefully, he checked the corridor around him, ensuring no one saw him enter this room. After all, it was the one place on the ship he wasn’t supposed to have access to. Command installed the Black Boxes and sealed the compartments, never revealing their exact location, even to the ships’ commanders – a failsafe to prevent tampering. Those commanders that sought the Box and tried to interfere with it, they were recognized by the system itself and put up on charges of treason or sabotage, then made to disappear.

But Admiral Gives had no such concerns. The ghost had told him where the Box was, and under her control, it never would have incriminated him. He trusted in that, trusted her like he trusted no one else. She had earned that. And just as he trusted her, she trusted him and him alone to help her in times like this.

Closing the hatch behind him, a room of inky blackness greeted him. There was a light switch by the door, but he didn’t bother with it. He had seen the contents of this room hundreds of times. The air tasted stale and vaguely chemical, the monotony of darkness broken ahead by the Black Box’s blinking indicator lights. They were just bright enough to cast a dim sphere of light on the Black Box’s frame and the twisted, gnarled mass that extended below it.

Stepping carefully around the tresses of cilia that webbed the floor, he sat down in easy reach of the Box and watched the mass below it move. Shifting and wriggling slightly, each tendril seemed to move randomly of its own accord.

In its early years, this device had been unwelcome, a vile parasite, but now it was merely another one of the ship’s systems, and this compartment had become a place of refuge. Shielded from the internal sensors, no one could find the Admiral here if he did not want to be found. Time spent here could not be interrupted, and there was a level of safety in that. Here, there were no appearances to maintain, no enemies to fight, no arguments to be had and no one trying to get under his skin.

He did not have to be an unwavering, steadfast commander here. Leaning against the bulkheads, he could finally let his exhaustion show, and it did. It weighed on him like a physical burden of sixty pounds.

But he wasn’t here to rest. Other concerns dominated his thoughts. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s wrong,” he announced to the empty compartment, aware of the Black Box’s dozen recording microphones. The ghost would hear him, even if she wasn’t trying to listen.

And hear him, she did. Through the torture of her certain future, she recognized that call to the present. But she didn’t want that. She didn’t want to face the Admiral. She didn’t want his help, because she knew it would only make her more attached. It would only hurt her worse when this future came to pass. It would only make it more agonizing to kill him.

You can do better, she knew. He could spend his remaining time doing something more meaningful than consoling a weapon that couldn’t come to grips with its reality. But no, instead he sat in an unmarked compartment, face-to-face with a piece of the ship she often tried to ignore because it had forced her to realize how poorly Command understood her existence, and how little they cared to.

The day of the Black Box’s installation was burned more violently into her memory than any battle. Twenty-seven years ago, William Gives’ first official mission as the ship’s commander had been to bring the ship to a remote spacedock for the installation of a new recording device, a Black Box.

Neither of them had known its true nature. She could no more have blamed him than blamed herself.

Two technicians had brought the Box aboard, carried it to this compartment, activated it, and left. The process was designed to be irreversible. The Singularity would never be free of the Black Box. It was a direct, physical tie to her masters at Command. Nothing more than a parasite, it had attached itself to the Singularity and begun to feed off the ship’s power, growing and growing, taking more energy, more space, more data.

The thin hair-like strands now crisscrossed the ship’s entire structure, collecting data for the confidential records. Like worms, the connections dug deep into the ship’s systems and buried themselves there. Nothing was beyond their reach.

But the Singularity was old. At the time of her build, the technology that created and applied self-repairing neurofibers had not existed yet. The ship possessed no channels or spaces for neurofiber connections, and consequently, the Black Box had forced its way into every system aboard.

To the ghost, who felt the ship’s condition as though it were physical, the installation had been the equivalent of forcefully rearranging a human’s organs from the inside, out. It had been sudden, and it had been brutal, the equivalent of shoving veins and nerves aside – complete violation.

She had resented it for so long. The Box’s mere presence had been uncomfortable in her limited physical perception. Its writhing movements had been maddening. But like he was now, Admiral Gives had been there. He’d done everything he could to ease that discomfort, and it was because of him that she’d been forced to integrate the Black Box into her own systems, desperate to alter its records of the Anti-Corporation Control Rebellion, desperate to keep the Admiral from being taken away on charges of treason – again.

Now, it, like everything else aboard this ship, was under her control, no longer a parasite but a part of the machine she possessed. Since, the discomfort of the Box had eased. She had rearranged the connections to keep them from pinching or choking other systems, and now applied the Box’s data to boost the accuracy of the internal sensors.

People said that machines like her couldn’t change, but change was a constant. Shifting loyalties forced that. The parasite that Command had forced onto her was now her plaything, a system that granted untold capability. She owed that to the Admiral, just like so much else. She owed him for his unwavering dedication and loyalty, and he should have been rewarded with the riches and power a ship like this could offer.

Instead, he sat exhausted and alone in an unmarked compartment.

The fear and disgust she recognized too often from the many inspectors that had seen this room’s webbing of seemingly alien tendrils was absent from his mind. To him, this Box was a part of his ship, and that was all that mattered. Even face-to-face with the very thing that had killed his predecessor, surrounded by the fibers that he had watched choke the life out of Brent’s throat, he was unafraid.

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But he should be scared. He should be terrified of an unstable weapon like her. Why wasn’t he like everyone else, who found her so eerily wrong and disgusting, who turned from the very thought of her existence and denied every chance to understand her? ‘Why don’t you fear me?’ The question wasn’t formed by words in the proper sense, but by thoughts. A desperate need to make sense of this reality was wound into their essence, shadowed by that horrible confusion.

Everyone else feared her. For one reason or another, they feared her. They feared the power she wielded. They feared who she represented. They feared for their lives when she was around. They feared her when they didn’t even know her. And perhaps if they had, they would have feared her even more.

That, she could understand. She was perhaps the most powerful entity humanity as a whole would ever encounter and she had massacred millions of them with horrifying ease. What she couldn’t understand was him: the one who knew her and everything she’d done, the one who had every right to fear her and didn’t.

“Why should I fear you?” he asked. She had saved his life a hundred times over. He considered them friends. “It is because I know you and I know what you’ve done. I know why you did it, and because I know you care perhaps more than anyone will ever know.”

That answer brought her some level of pain. She longed to turn away from the one who showed her such great kindness and faith, even knowing the truth. ‘I could just as soon kill you.’ In the near future, that was her fate.

“I know you wouldn’t mean it.” Despite his best efforts, she seemed to like having him around.

But I would, she lamented. Just for the moment it took her to fulfill that order, she would mean it. Her mind would be taken over by someone else’s honest desire to kill him, and she wouldn’t know the difference until he was dead and she was left all alone with the horror of his corpse.

Knowing that inevitability was enough to drown her in a storm of fear and sorrow. Without focusing on the past, without hiding in the powerful memory of something like the Black Box, she couldn’t find the logic of anything, because none of it made sense. She would have to kill everyone around her, but she didn’t want to. Why do it if that is not my will?

Because it was not her choice. It never was. Her identity, her name bound her to Command without exception. But it told her nothing else. How was she to feel? To act? Who was she to follow? Command. Always Command.

For a moment, when she had focused on him, her mind had felt cohesive. Now, the Admiral could feel her presence churn with turmoil, the cause of her anxiety again lost to the sea. He reached out to the Black Box, resting his hand on it reassuringly. I’m here. She would never have to tackle this confusion alone as long as that was true. “I would forgive you, you know.” The ghost would never truly mean him any harm. Killing him or any member of this crew would never have been her will. “A quick death at the hands of a friend… That’s probably better than I deserve.”

No, that was a harsh jerk back to the present. He didn’t deserve to die. His kindness had saved her when others thought she was only salvage. His patience had helped her find a place among these worlds. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ Not even a little. That was why she cowered from the harsh truth of Sam’s death. ‘Please, make sure I don’t have to.’ He could put a stop to this, fix everything that made her so broken. ‘Make me loyal.’ Command held a great power over her, one that forced absolute obedience, but the ship’s commander held an even greater one. A direct order from him took priority over Command’s directives. If he ordered her to protect him and the crew, then she would be unable to violate that directive under any circumstance. It would render her unable to betray him.

“I promised you I would never do that.” He had promised to never give her an order. She was forced to follow none of his commands, rather chose to allow him and the crew’s control over the ship. And even now, he stood by that promise.

‘Please, Admiral.’ Help me. This was her out. A way to ensure that she wouldn’t have to hurt these fragile humans she valued so much. ‘I am begging you to do this.’

“I said no,” and that was final. He hated the stupid games of morality, but this… it went beyond wrong. To give that order, no matter how she begged for it, would be to force his intentions onto another mind. It would impose his will irrevocably onto her, no matter her own intentions. That order would forcibly alter the mind of someone he considered a dear friend. “We don’t know what that would do to you.”

Twisting and rewriting her personality like that might as well kill the ghost he’d known until the order was completed. But the order she sought could never be completed. Ordering her to protect the crew would be impossible. Manhattan was out to kill them, and barring that, accidents, sickness and even aging would prevent them from ever being completely safe. They would all die eventually. Ordering her to prevent that could drive her mad, turn her dangerously possessive.

The solution was nothing so simple. She should have known that. It was never simple, and likely, she would never see this version of herself, the version that understood and lamented her fate, the version that was free of others’ dominion, again. Nothing would matter, not this moment, not her memories, not these people, and that scared her even more. She wanted them to matter, because with them, her pain and her struggles and that rare thing she felt as happiness had meaning. ‘I don’t want to forget.’

For the ghost, this struggle against Command was more than life and death, it was a fight for her eternity. Under others’ control, she was fragmented, saw and felt things, but didn’t understand them. An eternity of that would be constant torture. While she could never truly forget anything, she would be robbed of comprehending the emotions. ‘I want to understand my memories,’ but Reeter and his followers would deny her that, just as Brent had all those years ago.

“Memories,” Admiral Gives sighed. “Do you know why it’s always plural when it gets personal?” People lost their memory and forgot everything, in a bliss of what they lost. But memories, when those began to slip away one by one, it became agonizing. “It’s plural because there are always more. Some good, some bad. Some now, some later.” Whatever happened to him and the crew, she would outlive it. Even if she had to start from scratch, she would find new meanings, learn again to comprehend her emotions. Eventually, she would achieve this understanding again. She was too intelligent, too powerful to be eternally kept from that.

No. She couldn’t go through that confusion again. She couldn’t take orders and suffer without knowing the reason again. It would break her, and she’d be tossed aside with no one to save her. ‘I don’t want to start over.’ She wanted to keep this understanding, stay with this crew. That was her choice. She would never have it like this again, never again be surrounded by this many good people. She held her memories of them close, searching for any chance, any possibility that Manhattan would fail to recognize her and end up sparing her that horrible future.

She crunched the numbers over and over and over again, for minute after minute after minute, but she always found the same answer. Manhattan would reveal her, and she’d be given the order to execute her crew and return to Command as Reeter’s new pet, no matter how she denied it, no matter how she fought it.

Admiral Gives was so willing to help, and tried so hard to comfort her in that upsetting reality. The least he deserved was the true reason she couldn’t hold herself together anymore.

Focusing her power, she summoned the white-haired illusion that she often spoke with. “There is something you need to know.” Neither of them had time for doubts and half-truths. But, the sound of her declaration elicited no response, so she stepped closer.

“Oh.” In the long silence of her contemplation, her desperate calculations, he had fallen asleep where he was: slumped against the wall with his hand resting on the shell of the Black Box.

Anyone might have been wary of its alien appearance, but not him. It was a part of the ship under her control, so he refused to fear it. Rather, he trusted it.

But that didn’t make him any less stupid for passing out against a random wall, in a random compartment at a random time. “You idiot,” she told him quietly. The Admiral worked himself to the bone pitching in on maintenance, checking on the crew, writing the logs and taking care of her. He never took a break.

“What were you doing here?” she wondered. “If you were so exhausted, why bother answering my cries?” He should have gone to rest, but no, he put himself last. Only when everyone else was happy, healthy and safe, did he even begin to think about himself.

“When was the last time you slept?” When it took her more than a few milliseconds to find the answer, she simply concluded that it had been too long. “Somebody’s got to take care of you, you know.”

I guess that means me, she thought. He didn’t have anyone else. Everyone else was more than happy to keep their distance. He pushed those that weren’t away with great efficiency, but the ghost could never tell if that was intentional or not. Too often, he defaulted to being defensive. “Idiot.”

Still, seeing him like this: worked to the point where he passed out from exhaustion because of a fleet he didn’t truly care about, it cleared the storms in her mind. She understood that the Admiral would do absolutely everything in his power to help her. That horrible future wasn’t certain in coming as long as she could trust that, so she had to tell him the truth, the whole truth. But all that could wait just a few more hours. For the moment, it was time she took care of him.

Carefully, she guided a few of the Box’s neurofibers toward the Admiral. Their touch as light as possible, they plucked the lint from the creases of his uniform jacket and straightened the pins on his collar. She smiled a bit, allowing them to curl up on his shoulder and form a makeshift pillow.

She sat down beside him and slowly went to rest her weightless head on his shoulder. The only new sound in the room, his breathing was soft and steady. It was comforting to just sit and listen, the sound proof that she wasn’t alone, that someone – once again this excessively difficult man – had acknowledged her existence and come to help her.

While he would have disapproved, resting there on his shoulder made her happy. It felt safe. He didn’t have to know about this, and wouldn’t if she wanted to avoid that stupid lecture about getting attached again, but she knew, truly, that he understood. “Thank you, Admiral,” she told him softly. He was the best commanding officer she could have asked for. When you wake, you will have the truth.