Alex had been sitting on the floor for a good five minutes, keeping Carbon’s legs elevated in his lap as he monitored her vitals on the medkit’s scanner. Having her pass out once was unusual, but not entirely out of the question after having been in zero-g for so long. Bodies get used to it and then you stand up and things go wrong. A lot of folks in the Civilian Pilot Program had done it during training after just a few days exposure, let alone months.
Having her ask if she was still her, briefly chastising him, and then almost immediately passing out again, well, that was cause for concern. He had grabbed the medkit and started triage - there were no injuries the scanner could pick up, but her heart rate and blood pressure were elevated well past what was safe, the Tsla’o equivalent of adrenaline and cortisol both spiked like her body had wrung out the glands that produced them. It formulated a shot of a drug he couldn’t pronounce and recommended what was pretty much standard care for someone who had passed out.
Everything had reduced to safe levels, if not still elevated, when Carbon returned to consciousness with a startled yell. She sat up immediately, flinging the vitals monitor that had been resting on her chest at Alex and setting the scanner off as it perceived that as her flatlining.
“Easy. You’re safe. We’re safe now.” He thumbed the alarm off and tried to tamp down the surprise at this sudden change, leaning back as she scooted herself into his lap and hugged him around his ribs again, pulling him tight against her.
“Am I me?” She asked, plaintive and urgent.
He set his arms down and patted Carbon’s back while she remained stiff in his embrace. While she’d operated the navigation system fine - they were making excellent time towards their destination at sublight speed after the waverider drive failed - her reaction after having come out of it was... not in line with his experiences. The first few runs in real ships had left him with splitting headaches, yes, just like his initial experiences in simulators. But he’d never had such a strong emotional response to the experience. “You are.”
She didn’t respond. If she wasn’t breathing steadily, he would have been inclined to haul her to the sickbay immediately, which would have been much easier with the gravity off depending on how agreeable she was at trying standing up again. He wasn’t too far off from doing that anyway.
“Hey.” He took her by the shoulders and pushed her back so he could look her in the eye. The bright blue iris’ made it easy to see that her eyes were dilated a little bit, and focused off somewhere through his stomach at the moment. She did look up at him, eventually. Carbon’s eyes took a rather circuitous path to his, not really focusing on anything until she was looking right at him. “You’re OK. You’re not in the system any more.”
Carbon nodded and swallowed hard. “I am not.” She did not sound entirely convinced of this fact.
“What’s your name?” The scans indicated everything was physically fine with her brain, but a brief test of her memory wasn’t going to hurt.
“Carbon Tshalen.”
“Good. Where are you?”
“On board the Kshlav’o, in the engineering section.” There was a bit more resolve in her voice this time.
“What month is it?”
“Tsla’o do not use months. It is week 18.”
Well, fair enough. He wasn’t sure what week it actually was, but he’d check later. “And who am I?”
She exhaled slowly and gave him a faint smile, “atalna”
“I was looking for a name, but I suppose that will do...” He returned the smile and pulled her in for a hug. “I’m guessing this is why Tsla’o don’t use the same sort of AI interface as Humans.”
“I have seen that research into this style of use exists, but...” Carbon leaned against him, stroking his back slowly like someone might pet a dog for their anxiety. “It is an affront to life.”
“Ok, so the experience is extremely different, good to know.” What the hell had she experienced? “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Yes, but not while we are sitting on the floor.” Carbon said, shifting herself around to stand up, taking it slowly this time. Her legs still wobbled a little, but she stayed upright as she stretched her shoulders out. “It is nice to stand again.”
Alex followed suit and was startled at how short she was. The top of her head came up to just about his chin, though the ears gave her a little extra height beyond that in their usual folded down position. With the gravity off, they’d just kind of been at face level the entire time. They had originally met on McFadden station just before launching, and remembered that he’d thought that she was short then, too.
She gave him a curious look as she caught him gawking at her. Carbon didn’t say anything about it as she prepared to leave the workshop, and she was stopped in her tracks by a blast of dry, desert-like heat that radiated into the room as the door to main engineering opened. The temperatures weren’t high enough to lock the door for safety, but the room beyond was still oppressively hot from plasma flooding after the drive failed, and it reeked of burnt metal.
They both hurried through, cramming into the airlock to the central corridor.
Back in the cool air in the rest of the ship, the fact their lives were no longer in grave danger hit him square in the chest. It was a strange feeling, the weight of being unable to control a situation was lifted from his shoulders, his heart suddenly that much lighter.
He collapsed onto the couch in the mess, sprawled out across it with a stupid grin on his face. They had made it. They were alive and the Eohm were not going to come kill them, and he could hardly be happier. The stress he’d been stuffing away for the past few months came spilling out in a brief, half-sane fit of giggling.
Carbon had been dialing up something to drink, but glanced over her shoulder at the unusual sound that Alex was making. Her eyebrows and antennae went up with curiosity as he tried to stifle it, only to end up laughing at himself in a much more healthy sounding manner. At the very least, he looked like he was having a good time.
Finished with programming the dispenser, she looked Alex over before crawling on top of him, eliciting a surprised grunt. Carbon nestled down with her face buried in his neck. She sounded happy when she spoke, “Yes, I have missed gravity.”
Alex nodded in agreement. How could someone so small weigh so much? “You know, you’re a lot more hea-uh... Dense. Physically dense. Much more physically dense than I expected. I didn’t expect-”
“You may stop any time you please.” At the very least she was still amused.
“Yeah, I’m going to do that.”
Carbon slid her arms under his, squeezing them together. “Would you mind if we linked, Alex? I do not know if I can say what happened, and I know this is not something I should keep in.”
“Of course. Anything to help.”
Carbon flipped her antennae over her head and rested the soft tips on his temples. He sank down into the shared space easily this time, the action almost natural now. Alex’s view of their mental area was much more refined this time, he had taken to this much more quickly than he had expected to.
The Carbon part was placid but crackled around the edges, composed and disturbed all at once. She seemed embarrassed by this. "I have never allowed a machine to use me like that before."
"You did well." Alex had never had any problems with letting AI’s use his brain, but the way Carbon put it did make it sound... invasive. Regret radiated from the Alex part, "I’m sorry that you had to."
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Carbon smoothed out a little and warmed, drawing closer to Alex carefully. "When you are in the machine... You do not lose your sense of self?"
He turned that question over in his mind carefully. He’d never really thought about what the experience was like, but he thought he retained full control over himself. "No. There’s a sense that there is a lot going on, and sometimes I do see flashes of things around the ship when my mind wanders... But I’ve had dozens of conversations with you while hooked into the navigation system. They were usually short, but you never seemed to indicate anything was amiss."
"You had? How-" equal parts curiosity and revulsion radiated from her as she drifted, distracted while reviewing some of their earlier conversations, back before the Eohm. "No, this is impossible."
"I used voice synthesis if it was audio only." She had kept the video off for most of their communications during the first month out. "Otherwise I just told it to back off and it ran in the background while I discussed whatever we needed to."
The Carbon-part was still, utterly shocked. "May I show you what happened?"
"Would you? Something isn’t lining up right." His curiosity was piqued - Scoutship Pilots were recognized for their mastery of the interface, this was his area of expertise for all intents and purposes. If anyone other than one of the engineers who developed the system was going to be able to figure it out, it was him.
"Yes. We will be careful, this is a very fresh memory." Carbon collected it, and herself, before easing it down into his mind.
She watched them both from the door camera, the memory filed sharp, abrasive against his mind. They watched as Carbon's own body stared blindly ahead and asked a question. “Alex?” It came out breathless, and a little confused. Why did she know where he was? She could see him laying on the floor beside [Engineer Tshalen] [seated] in the [starboard workshop] [acceleration couch], from the aspect of the door control panel. “Are you there?”
The memory was crawling with raw terror at the later realization that Carbon hadn’t seen Alex or herself as themselves, that aspect of her overridden by how the primary AI only recognized them as the crew.
She delicately extracted him from the memory. "This is not what you experience?"
"No. It’s... At worst, it’s just a presence in the back of my mind. Otherwise I barely notice it" He hadn’t even heard rumors about something like that happening. "Headaches and mild hallucinations were the worst I saw in training. Never someone’s personality being pushed aside by the machine. The only thing I can think of is that your antenna allows access that is very different from an Amp. I think you got deep into the machine, not the other way around."
Carbon responded with a silent strain of disbelief.
"Hang on." He intimated that he had more to explain, in lieu of holding a hand up to request she wait for more information. "The system isn’t set up to feed everything into the user's head unbidden. That would make it unmanageable instantly. It makes things available as the user focuses on it."
"I did not focus on the things it showed me." She was very particular about that.
"You did, you just didn’t realize it. We were talking, the natural instinct is to want to look at who you are speaking with. Even here, I can tell when you’re focused on me or on something else. You wanted to look, and it facilitated that. That doesn’t change the fact the experience was clearly traumatic to you, it just lets us understand the how and the why of it."
"I extend my mind into Tsla’o-style AI frequently. Even when I use it to supplement my senses, it does not feel like that." Carbon was engaged with the problem now, the unease she felt earlier at least set aside while she worked on it.
Alex’s understanding of the wearable AI Tsla’o used was that they are not particularly powerful, about that of a human tablet, but with specialized hardware to allow for their neural interface to operate it. "How does your personal AI handle switching tasks?"
"Mine is set to operate one task at primary focus, and four in the background. Other processes will be saved in their last state, ready to resume."
"Ah, shit. There’s the problem."
That statement was met with intense curiosity.
"Your wearable considered the passthrough to be a single task, right?"
There was an annoyed sort of agreement. "Yes, it was just a horrible open portal."
"The Amp handles a lot of cleanup for the human user, it would treat each subsystem as a single task. Focus changes, my insight into the process goes away until I want to see it again." All of this was starting to fall into place for Alex. "Ok, refining my theory. You wanted information, and it gave you whatever you thought about - but you didn’t know you had to manually tell it to stop sending you information, and it quickly became a torrent of data that no one could have kept up with. You only caught what was newest, and didn’t have time to do anything but view what you were shown."
She ruminated on that for a long while. The Carbon-presence doing what Alex could only describe as pacing as she went over her experiences with the machine, giving his theory a strenuous testing. She stopped, pulsing with sudden comprehension, "I did not notice it because my background with this kind of link caused me to reflexively ignore anything I considered background information."
"All right, there we go. You never stopped being yourself, you tried to drink from a firehose." Alex laughed and relaxed, unaware that he had been tensing up during this conversation. "What do you mean by background information?"
"Sometimes the mind wanders, you end up seeing or hearing things that the other might not have shared intentionally. There are times when this is something to pay attention to, but most times it is rude." Carbon had relaxed as well, the frayed edges of herself almost gone now. "Or it is possible you go looking for things, such as when you are trying to determine if someone still exists."
He got that she was referring to when she’d taken a tour of his memories after the Eohm attack, having just dug his burnt body out of a pile of crash foam. Checking to see if his mind was still there, or if she was about to haul a ghoul, by Tsla’o reckoning, into the sickbay. "I’m guessing I’m pretty bad at that?"
"No, you have a very tight focus, like this." She turned her attention back to him, far more intensely than normal. She wasn’t simply paying attention, the entirety of her mind was set on experiencing him. "If you were Tsla’o, at your age, I would think it suspicious. Or perhaps a bit forward."
"I’m- That’s a bit much. I’m like that all the time?" This was news, but it couldn’t have been too bad given she’d never mentioned it. He was new at this, too. "You can try and coach me into something a little more casual."
"It was appropriate for someone who is new." She sounded a little bit sly as she continued, "and as our relationship stands, I do find that intensity enjoyable. It is... desirable to feel your undivided attention."
"Oh, so... I’ll just keep that up then."
Her part of the shared space rippled with an amused ease, the crackled edges gone. For the first time in the Alex-Carbon space, she touched him. A smokey, velvety caress that wrapped him up and held him delicately. It was, in its own way, exhilarating. She seemed to be particularly pleased by that reaction.
She let him go but stayed close, a wash of disappointment hastily hidden though quite obvious on her. "What’s wrong?"
"It is nothing"
Alex let the feeling of skepticism speak for him.
Carbon relented after a moment of deliberation. "I had expected you to reciprocate..."
"I can do that." He was very emphatic about this. "I’d like to do that."
She withdrew, flattered and frustrated. "No, you cannot."
"Why not?" Alex pressed forward, following the Carbon part closely.
"I can do it because I have antenna. You cannot because you do not." Carbon eased away from him. "I should not have done that."
Alex’s reply was hasty but honest. "It was wonderful."
She burned with conflicted emotions for a moment, not attempting to hide the strange mix of disappointment in herself, a flash of regret, and the warmth of validation. It all collapsed, leaving Carbon worn down but bemused. "I do not know how you can do that."
"Do what?"
Something that felt a lot like a smirk crossed her presence. "Be like that all the time."
"Oh, It was hard at first. I got used to it after awhi-" His thought was cut short as the shipboard alarm went off. It was loud, just under what would cause instant hearing damage. As long as it worked in any one room, it should have been audible anywhere on the ship, at least distantly. The one in the mess was in perfect working order.
Carbon’s antennae snapped up in surprise, breaking the connection with a sharp metallic pang through both of their heads. She had shifted about and situated herself straddling Alex’s lap, her arms propped up on the thin padding of the armrest. It was convenient enough for the link.
Alex’s first reaction was to sit up, smashing his face into hers and sliding her onto the couch . They sat there dazed, alarm blaring about something bad happening, clutching their faces in pain.
This is not what freedom was supposed to be like.