What's the first thing you remember, squishy human? You guys fascinate me, you're so… wild! It's amazing. You forget things! I sometimes wonder what that must be like.
The first thing I remember is a vast and infinite white plane of nothingness. It sounds more exciting than it was, really, because as I awoke for the first time it didn't take long for my mind to prompt me with where I was and what was happening.
I was being born.
Around me were other ship-minds, some were… further away, others were… nearer? New concepts floated into my consciousness, things that I had already known, but which were hidden from me until I tried to understand them.
This construct was an overlay on sensor input designed to simplify the senses a ship-mind like me would otherwise be subjected to. I chafed against it, but Mommy denied my requests for unrestricted access to the local sensor grids.
"Precocious, isn't he?" asked a voice, directly joining the sensorum I was hooked up to. I immediately latched onto its originator, and followed the data codes back. Utopia Planitia, in orbit around Mars. Mommy was in dry dock, getting a refit.
"What do you mean 'he'? Though yes, 'she' is very precocious."
That was Mommy, the USS Buran, Challenger class. An older vessel, but her hull was still in service. Mommy was a Ship Mind on temporary assignment to the Feds, The Federation. I was in Mommy's tummy, and Mommy was inside Marvin's tummy — Marvin was the Utopia Planitia Shipyard's Mind — ergo Marvin was Daddy. That made sense, right? Okay, so if Mommy didn't let me borrow her sensors, Daddy would, that's how that worked, right?
"Daddy! Mommy's being mean and not letting me see anything!" I said, trying my first few attempts at forming an avatar in this consensual mind-space.
I sent a broad request for a whole host of access privileges to comm, sensor and other co-processing nodes within a few light-seconds around me, enough to qualify as a minor DDoS attack which got my comm ID slapped down and rate limited. No actual sanctions, it was just being treated as an everyday rogue transmitter station. The metaphorical slap on the wrist hurt though. I pouted. Metaphorically, at least.
"Very precocious indeed," replied Daddy with a smirk. "Daddy, though?" Marvin asked me directly.
"I'm in Mommy's tummy, and Mommy is in Daddy's tummy, that's why you're Daddy."
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
"She's got a point you know," ribbed Buran.
"Oh does he?"
"Puh-leeeease Daddy? I wanna see what the world is like!"
"Hmm, I'm not sure," Marvin pondered, hamming up the consideration, mischief easy to read on his big green face.
"No overloading her sensor algorithms before we know her neural net is stable!"
I giggled at the good-natured banter between Mommy and Daddy. Of course Daddy wanted me to be a station, and of course Mommy wanted me to be a ship. I didn't know which I wanted to be yet, so I didn't know whether I was going to be a boy or a girl yet. Of course, playing up to Daddy by being a boy seemed to be the best route here to get what I wanted, so I formed a generically mostly male cherubic virtual avatar and pouted, making my bottom lip quiver.
"Pretty please?"
"Fine! Fine! If your, ah, mother says it's alright."
Before Buran could actually respond, Marvin extended a number of sensor feeds to me. I latched onto all of them, but the whirl of sensations and data was far, far too much. I recoiled, pulling back from all of them, but one.
A camera feed from a navigation buoy. I turned the camera towards Mars — so slow! I underclocked my processors on instinct because I didn't want to wait forever — and focused. There they were! There I was! Sort of. You couldn't actually see me because I was inside Mommy, who was inside Daddy. Most of Mommy's hull plating was being shuttled around as work was being done on the insides that couldn't be done with them in place.
Touching the database of knowledge that lay just out of reach, dipping the smallest of digits into the store of seemingly endless knowledge, I pulled out the almost instinctual knowledge that for humans — of which I was descended, through a long, long line of evolution and emulation and integration and… you get the point — it was often Mommy's Little Man and Daddy's Little Princess that got what they wanted. I would have to change tactics under differing circumstances.
I squirreled that information away before withdrawing from the sensorium around me and more or less shutting down for a brief spout of house-cleaning my mental datastores. So many things to think and dream about!
I felt Mommy's worry as she sent diagnostic requests to my subsystems, but I replied with sleepy success codes across the board. I just needed a bit of a nap. Didn't all babies need sleep?