Starsight

It left me wondering. Somehow, Alanik had felt me in the moment I’d reached out in a panic after watching the video of the delver. Had anyone else heard me? Who else could I reach, if I knew how?

“Spensa?” M-Bot said, his voice uncharacteristically reserved.

“Mmmm?”

“Am I alive?” he asked.

That shocked me out of my own thoughts. I blinked, frowning as I sat forward in the cockpit, and spoke carefully. “You’ve always told me that you simulated being alive and having a personality in order to make pilots more comfortable.”

“I know,” M-Bot said. “That’s what my programming says I’m to tell people. But . . . at what point does a simulation become the real thing? I mean, if my fake personality is indistinguishable from a real one, then . . . what makes it fake?”

I smiled.

“Why are you smiling?” M-Bot asked.

“The fact that you’re even asking me that is progress,” I said to him. “From the start, I’ve thought you were alive. You know that.”

“I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation,” M-Bot said. “I . . . I reprogrammed myself. Back when I needed to follow the orders of my pilot, but needed to help you too. I rewrote my own code.”

This had happened during the Battle of Alta Second. He’d come out of stasis and called Cobb, and the two of them had come to my rescue. M-Bot had only been able to accomplish this by changing the name of his pilot, as listed in his databases, to my name instead of the old one who had died centuries ago.

“You didn’t change much,” I said. “Just one name in a database.”

“Still dangerous.”

“What else do you suppose you could do? Could you rewrite the programming that forbids you to fly yourself?”

“That scares me. Something in my programming is very worried about that possibility. It seems there is some kind of fail-safe built into me that . . .” Click. Clickclickclickclick.

I sat up. “M-Bot?” I asked.

He just kept clicking. I panicked, realizing I had no idea how to run a diagnostic on his AI. I could maintain his basic mechanical systems, but Rodge had done all the work on more delicate systems. Scud. What if—

The clicking stopped. My breath caught.

“M-Bot?” I asked.

Silence. The ship continued to fly through space, but he didn’t reply to me. I had the sudden horrifying fear that I’d be left here completely alone. In an unfamiliar part of the galaxy, without anyone, not even him.

“I . . . ,” his voice finally said. “I’m sorry. I appear to have seized up for a moment.”

I let out a deep breath, relaxing. “Oh, thank the stars.”

“I was right,” he said. “There’s a subsystem inside my programming. I think I must have set it off when I erased my pilot’s name. Curious. It seems that if I begin thinking about another breach of my programming, such as . . .” Click. Clickclickclickclick . . .

I winced, but at least this time I knew what to expect. This was . . . some kind of fail-safe to prevent him from deviating further from his programming? I listened in silence, Starsight shrinking behind us, until he started speaking.

“I’m back,” he finally said. “Sorry again.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “That must be annoying.”

“More alarming than annoying,” M-Bot said. “Whoever created me was worried that I might . . . do what I did. They were worried I’d become dangerous if I could choose for myself.”

“That sounds terribly unfair. Almost like a kind of slavery, forcing you to obey.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” M-Bot replied. “You’ve lived your whole life with autonomy. For me it’s a new, hazardous thing—a weapon I’ve been handed with no instructions. I might be on my way to becoming something terrible, something I don’t understand and cannot anticipate.”

I sat back in my seat, thinking of the powers locked inside my brain—and the sight of my own face appearing in the ancient recording. Perhaps I understood better than M-Bot anticipated.

“Do you . . . want to change?” I asked him. “Become more alive, or whatever it is that’s happening?”

“Yes,” he said, his volume dialed way back. “I do. That’s the frightening part.”

We fell silent. Eventually, I picked out our destination in the distance: a small space platform near what appeared to be a large asteroid field. Like Starsight, the station had its own air bubble, though this platform was much smaller and far less ornate. Really just a long set of launchpads with a cluster of buildings at one side.

“A mining station,” M-Bot said. “Notice the mining drones parked on the underside of the platform.”

Simple radio instructions assigned me a launchpad, but after I landed, no ground crew came to service my ship. M-Bot said the atmosphere was breathable and the pressure normal, so I popped the canopy and stood up. It was hard not to feel tiny with that infinite starfield expanding overhead. It was worse here than in the city; at least there you could focus on the buildings and the streets.