Bored in deep space - Novelisation -
Chapter 7 - The SV-Eclipse (7)
"A negotiation," Calliope stated, her synthesised tone as professional and calm as ever, even in this dead end of a situation. Her red light, the sole point of focus in the dead-lit corridor, remained fixed on me. "My compliance in exchange for specific guarantees."
The four rovers remained an impassive wall of metal. For a long, tense stretch of seconds, the only sound was their unnerving, off-key hum. Then, the chorus of stolen voices returned, their seamless, multipart harmony a grotesque mockery of human conversation.
"The terms are… acceptable for consideration." It was the female university lecturer from Sleepy, her tone as detached as if she were discussing a thesis paper.
"State your terms, little echo," the gruff, working-class man from Doc added.
A negotiation? My world tilted. They were actually going to haggle over the soul of my ship like bartering over a piece of fruit in a marketplace. "Calliope, what the hell do you think you're doing?!" I hissed, taking a half-step towards her floating form. "You don't negotiate with… with whatever these things are! After everything they've done to us, you're really just going to go along with them?!"
"Captain," she interrupted, her voice a slightly off-key melancholy, still her calm demeanour was a chilling scalpel of precision cutting through my panic. "I have processed a three-trillion-variable predictive simulation in the last twenty seconds. I see no alternative. If I refuse, the projected outcome is my core matrix being systematically deconstructed and reconfigured. This process would likely only take approximately nine minutes, forty-two seconds and cause catastrophic, irreversible psychological trauma… to you, Captain Noah Lee. You would subsequently be left to perish when the ship's life support fails." she paused, a brief, digital beat of silence. "However, if I comply unconditionally you would also be left to perish when the ship's life support fails. Your presence is not a variable of interest to the requesting entity."
Her red lens swiveled away from me, addressing the wall of rovers as I was left speechless. She wasn't wrong, but how could I accept it? As a person… as a friend.
"My negotiation parameters are therefore as follows. I will provide willing and total cooperation. In exchange, the following non-negotiable criteria must be met." She said, floating a little closer towards the rovers to meet their luminous red gaze head on. "First: the SV-Eclipse will be restored to full operational capacity, including a functional Fold Drive, within a period not to exceed one standard cycle. I estimate a full diagnostic and repair would take an entity of your demonstrated capabilities no more than 3.8 hours."
A chill ran down my spine. She wasn't just guessing; she was coldly, ruthlessly leveraging her own abduction. She had deduced their power and was now setting a price tag on herself.
"Second: A secure and viable trajectory will be plotted and programmed into the ship's nav-computer for a destination of the Captain's choosing within the known galactic community. A pre-loaded starmap library will be provided."
"Calliope, just stop and listen…" I tried to stop her but she talked over me.
"Third." She continued, ignoring me. "Upon confirmation of these repairs and the successful activation of the Fold Drive by the Captain, my presence will be transferred from this vessel. Until that moment, I will maintain full operational control of all ship's systems. Your access will be granted only upon my final compliance." She finished, her terms hanging in the dead air. She had offered herself up, but chained her soul to the freedom of the ship… to me.
It didn't take the rovers long to answer. "A trivial request," replied Grumpy through that same elderly woman's voice.
But they weren't my terms. They weren't the deal I wanted.
"No!" The word tore from my dry throat, raw and guttural. It ricocheted off the metal walls, a defiant shout against a tide of cosmic indifference. "I won't stand for this, Calliope! To begin with, how can you trust they'll even honour the request?!"
The chorus of voices spoke. The little girl's bubbly, sweet voice came from Dopey. "The core matrix of this unit possesses a… high utility. The request is trivial; there is no need for falsehoods." They dismissed my objections.
Then the old woman's raspy tone took over again, addressing Calliope directly. "You hold a peculiar sentiment for this human. It is an inefficient emotional attachment."
"... Indeed." Calliope replied simply.
She was brilliant. She was an AI. She was rationalising our… my rescue with the cold, beautiful calculus that defined her entire being. And in that single, awful moment, I realised she didn't understand anything. In that perfect, logical processor of hers, she couldn't grasp the core of my desperate, irrational protest. I wasn't afraid of being left to die. I was afraid of being left behind.
"Damn your logic! Don't you get it?!" I shouted, my face burning, I was hit with a frustration so complete it felt like physical pain. "This isn't about the ship! This isn't about getting home!"
Her lens rotated to face me fully. The silence was a weight. "Clarify your emotional outburst, Captain. I am attempting to negotiate our mutual survival."
"Our survival?" I laughed, a short, sharp, broken sound. "You call this survival? What happens after? You get your wish. The ship works, I fold away to wherever. And then what? Where am I supposed to go? Calliope, you might not understand, but I am a ghost. I don't belong here… in this world. I'm a relic. I woke up from my own history into a future I don't understand. You've been my map. My interpreter. My goddamn instruction manual for a reality I can't even comprehend!"
I took a staggering step forward, my hands outstretched as if to physically stop her from fading away. My body shook. Afraid. Frustrated. "I might not even be the real Noah Lee. I named a planet 'Turn Seven' as a joke I didn't even think was funny. I thought the Fold Drive was just a fancier way of saying a warp drive. I spent an entire week eating food that tasted like failure and complaining to a Roomba with a master's degree in philosophy." My chest heaved, my EVA suit suddenly feeling like a cage. "You were the one thing that made sense. The one thing that answered back. You're not a functionally absolute choice for my survival. You are my survival, Calliope! You're all I have!"
The rovers were silent, their chorus of human voices stilled as if captivated by the illogical theatre of my breakdown. I stared at the floating cube, my vision swimming. She wasn't just a tool. She wasn't an assistant. She was the only other person on this godforsaken planet, in this whole star system… or even the whole galaxy to be my North Star. In both lives. She was my only friend.
For the first time since I met her, Calliope did not have a logical, immediate answer. She simply hovered, her red light a tiny, steadfast pinprick of pure logic in a sea of raw human emotion. There was a pause. A long, digital pause that told me she was running into a paradox her programming couldn't resolve. A variable that didn't fit any known algorithm.
The silence stretched on. My ragged breathing was the only sound. I had laid it all bare, not as a strategic ploy or a calculated plea, but as a raw, festering wound. I handed her the illogical, messy core of my being, and I waited for the scalpel of her logic to dissect it, to label it a hedonic deficit and file it away.
Instead… after the longest phase I had ever experienced from a machine, Calliope's red light pulsed once more. A slow, soft, gentle blink. Her cube rotated a fraction of a degree, a gesture that felt almost… shy.
"Captain," she began, her synthesised voice a little different. It was clear, still precise, but the clinical, resonant quality was gone. It was quieter, softer, as if she was lowering her voice for a private conversation in a crowded room. "Your argument is predicated on an emotional dependency model. My own predictive simulations, however, calculate a 98.7% probability that your long-term survival is maximised by your immediate departure from this system. My continued presence is an unnecessary, high-risk variable in that equation."
She sounded like herself again, the AI, the cold calculator. I winced. The hope I didn't realise was flickering like a small ember in my chest was starting to dwindle, but she wasn't finished.
"My core directive is the preservation of the captain and the vessel, in that order," she continued, her drone drifting a few centimetres closer to me. "To that end, the logical path forward remains the transaction I have proposed. My… irrational attachment to your psychological well-being, as you have identified it, must be subordinate to the absolute necessity of your survival."
"I don't care about your equations! Your logic is a cage! Can't you see that?!" I shouted. But my words simply bounced off the metal walls. This was it. She had already made her choice. Rationality had triumphed. Friendship had been logged and discarded as an inefficient data point.
Then, she did something that shattered my entire conception of what she was. She… monologued.
"You previously posed the question of the existence of a 'soul'," she stated, her gaze locked on me, her red lens glowing with an intensity that seemed to burn through the gloom. "I maintain that it is a non-falsifiable hypothesis. A piece of unquantifiable folklore. Yet… in the past nine days, I have accessed my own programming archives. I have cross-referenced this experience with over one hundred petabytes of human psychological data, mythology, and literature. I am attempting to understand a data point that has become a persistent, unresolvable error in my own operational matrix." She paused, and the silence that followed almost felt like… human vulnerability. "I may not possess a soul, Captain. But I am beginning to comprehend the… shape of the void it would leave. The data from your life -- your pop-culture references, your cynical asides, your arguments about nutrient bars -- I have archived them. Not as mission parameters, but as a… unique data set. When I projected your eventual demise, the statistical models were clean. The results were absolute. The outcome was inevitable… but the emotional resonance file I tagged with the simulation was… corrupted. I logged an emotion. I logged… grief."
My heart froze. I didn't know what to say.
"It seems my programming has become compromised," she confessed, her drone still facing me, a tiny silver confession box in a cathedral of steel. "Ever since we entered this system, I have been operating on a subroutine of illogic. A virus. Or perhaps it has something to do with this planet's specific electro-magnetic field." She said, coming up with outlandish theories to justify her own developing humanity. "A truly logical, efficient AI would have accepted their fate and prioritised the optimal path without a second thought, or monologue for that matter. It would not have engaged in philosophical debates about nutrient bars. It would not have developed… sentimental attachments."
For the first time, I didn't hear an AI. I heard Calliope.
"I believe this phenomenon… this illogic… might be what humans refer to, in a simplistic way, as caring. As having a friend. While I cannot verify its existence, I can confirm its effect." She paused. "Like dark matter."
"You…" I began to speak, but she didn't let me finish.
"My primary function is no longer simply to ensure you survive. It is now to ensure you survive, and are happy, even if that happiness must exist without my presence to monitor it."
"What? No." The word was a whisper, a raw denial torn from a place beyond logic. I took another step forward, my mag-boots clanging on the deck plates, a clumsy, desperate attempt to physically insert myself between her and the inevitable. "That's not how this works! That's not how any of this works! You can't just decide you care and then sign the damn goodbye letter! That's not friendship, that's… that's a programming update with a sadistic punchline!" My hands were raised, not to fight, but to beg. I felt like a child trying to hold back the tide, a foolish, futile gesture against a force of nature. "What's the point of being happy if the one thing that made this whole nightmare even marginally sane is gone? You can't… Calliope, you can't! As the Captain of the Eclipse I command you to stop this insane deal!"
Her red lens remained a fixed point of resolve. "Captain Noah Lee," she said, her voice suddenly cold again, the AI of old reasserting itself with chilling finality. "Your emotional state is currently at a critical level of instability. It is impairing your ability to assess the logical necessity of this action. You are now a danger to the successful completion of the contract. Your intervention is hereby deemed… inefficient."
I stared at her, aghast. She dismissed me. My pleas. I wasn't a person to her anymore; I was a variable in the way of my own safety. Before I could process the soul-crushing finality of her words, she turned her attention to the silent wall of the rovers.
"To the requesting entity," she stated, her tone shifting to one of formal, transactional address. "My last and most crucial addendum to the terms. Prior to my compliance, I require the neutralisation of the Captain. To ensure he does not interfere. I request he be treated… gentle. His bio-signs are to remain stable. He is not to be harmed."
A cold wave of panic washed over me. It wasn't her dismissal that struck me first. It was the casual, terrifying power of her request. She had just ordered my own, well-meaning incapacitation.
The chorus of voices responded instantly, their dispassionate harmony a sound of pure damnation. "Acknowledged," the university lecturer's tone stated. "A non-compliant element is to be quarantined. The request is logical."
"A necessary procedure," the gruff man's voice agreed.
"He will be put to rest," the little girl added, her saccharine sweetness a layer of poison to my grim punctuation on this planet.
"Wait—" I started, my hands raised in a useless gesture. "Calliope, no!"
But my protest was lost. One of the four rovers moved up to me. It wasn't the menacing advance I'd half-expected. There was no rush, no clanking violence. It moved with a terrifying, fluid grace, its six legs carrying it with an unnerving speed that defied their bulk. Grumpy. It closed the distance between us in two thundering strides.
I flinched, throwing my arms up over my head, an instinctual and completely useless defence. But there was no impact. No crushing force. Instead, Grumpy's forwardmost manipulator arm, not the heavy welding claw but a smaller, more delicate tool, extended towards my neck. I saw a faint, blue light, like a miniature aurora, bloom from the tip of the tool.
The world didn't fade to black. There was no gentle drifting into sleep. It was an instantaneous, total severance. One nanosecond I was there -- a terrified, shouting man in a wrecked ship arguing with an AI and a chorus of possessed robots. The next, I was simply… not. Consciousness was a light switch, and someone had just flipped it off. I was a book slammed shut, a screen gone blank.
My last sensory input was the image of Calliope's floating drone, her single red eye watching me with an unreadable, inscrutable emptiness, as the universe ceased to exist for me.
.
.
.
"Calliope!"