“I can do this all day,” said the tiny man on my screen before the thug hit him again and sent his head into a garbage can. I lay, reclined in what had once been the captain’s chair of a spaceship. The room was filled with dim light from what had once been the main viewport. How it had come to be facing almost straight up into the sky was beyond me but I’d seen weirder results of hypersonic crashes. It was a rare cloudless night and a pair of moons, along with a multitude of stars, turned the usual inky black into a pleasant glow.

The movie I was watching was pretty much ancient, part of a series of over a hundred interconnected films from back when that had been popular. I’d have preferred something newer, at least in an era without such obvious special effects but beggars can’t be choosers and I basically only had what Ai could download from crashed ships. We hadn’t been able to pick up a ton and so there were a lot of movies I’d watched a dozen or more times. This ship I was in had hundreds of copyright protection free movies like this one to choose from and it was nice to finally have some real variety.

“Do we have to watch this one?” Cyrus asked petulantly. “This guy is such a boring goody goody. Do the one with the guy in the robot suit. He’s at least funny.”

“Not a chance. Being in a robot suit isn’t exactly escapist fantasy to me at this point.”

“Ugh,” Cyrus said, annoyance clear in his voice.

We watched mostly in silence for a long time. It was wonderful, sitting there in the quiet with someone else to experience it with me. Even if Cyrus and Ai weren’t actually there in the room with me and even if Ai wasn’t really technically a person, it still felt like they both were.

“Euclid?” Ai’s voice said, eventually. On screen the tiny man, who was no longer so tiny, was rescuing people from cages.

“What’s up Ai?”

“There is a storm moving in between our locations. It will likely disrupt our ability to communicate for several hours.”

“Okay. Does it look like it will hit either of us?”

“Perhaps outer ends of the storm but it should not prove dangerous for either of us.”

“Alright. You’ve uploaded the rest of the map for the trip to my system right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. How much longer until we lose connection?”

“It is hard to say. I’d like to continue to watch the movie with you though for as long as I can.”

I had to smile at that.

“Yeah. We can probably rewatch whatever you miss tomorrow night.”

“Thank you.”

We were quiet again after that. The little icon for her part of the call we were using to communicate dropped out not long afterward. I sighed and wiggled a bit in the chair. It wasn’t uncomfortable thanks to the chair and the suit but I still couldn’t keep a bit of discontent away. It didn’t help that things weren’t going well in the movie. The bad guy had just ripped off his face to show a red skull beneath.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“What do you know about Ai?” Cyrus asked suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what do you know about her?”

“What’s there to know? She’s a computer. She’s trapped here the same as I am.”

“Exactly. She’s a computer. You know why artificial intelligence technology moved away from having recognizable personalities don’t you?”

“Uh, no. Not exactly.”

“Because,” he said slowly and carefully to push the point in, “AIs without personalities are hard to mistake for people. And when you remember that it’s not a person it’s easier to see what its actions are pointing you towards.”

“Cyrus, what exactly are you getting at?”

“Look kid, I don’t want to be mean, but I saw that ship you two made. Exactly how sure are you that it was space worthy? That you’d have survived taking it out of the atmosphere, much less trying to use it to get to a different planet.”

“Ai said it was fine. We wanted to get more parts for the ship, make some improvements but we needed the ship to be able to fly at all to find those parts,” I said, surprising myself at the heat in my voice.

“Woah now. Look, I know she means a lot to you. I’m just concerned, is all. I’m gonna have to ride on that thing too, you know.”

“You don’t have to be concerned about Ai.”

“Alright, cool, cool. I’m glad there’s nothing she’s hiding from you.”

The silence in the room at those words was deafening. I wanted to say something in response, but the only thing that filled my head was a door. The door was in the control room of the Ariel. It was the only door in the ship that Ai wouldn’t open for me. She said that was where her main unit was located, that even going in there could potentially damage some of her systems. That had always struck me as odd and I wasn’t exactly sure how we were going to move her to our new ship when it was time to leave but it had never really struck me as being anything ominous.

“Right?” Cyrus said. It was a question but the tone felt as though he were looking into my head and seeing the door for himself.

“Right,” I said too quickly. “Can we just watch the movie now?”

“Sure, sure.”

----------------------------------------

It was hours later when I woke up. Something was creaking, ever so gently. I opened my eyes to see that a shadow was being cast on me. A big shadow.

I moved very slowly, turning my head by slow degrees until I could look up to where the sound was coming from. I wished I hadn’t the moment I saw what was up there.

Standing on the glass of the ship’s viewport was a creature that reminded me of a wolf. If wolves could grow to be about eight feet tall at the shoulder and spent their days pumping iron and doing steroids. I could see it’s curling vicious claws, tapping on the clear material of the viewport. The creaking sound was from the creature shifting its weight as the wind savaged it, throwing is long grey-white fur about like a cloak. Its eyes gleamed in the feeble moonlight but it was its teeth that caught my own eye. There were just so many. The bent, nearly hooked fangs hanging from under its lip seemed to go on and on, an impossible number of teeth.

The creature sniffed at the air, searching for some scent. I told myself it couldn’t be mine. It couldn’t be looking for me. I hadn’t been outside in hours and there was no way it could smell me through the viewport. God, I hoped it couldn’t.

The creature moved and I couldn’t stifle the flinch that was my body's attempt to flee. Luckily it was not looking at me but out into the night. It stalked off of the ship with the terrible grace of a predator on the hunt.

After that, I didn’t get much sleep. As it turns out, not being able to see the monster that’s trying to eat you is so much worse than being able to see it.