The background chorus swelled louder. “How to explain? Should I explain? What point now, when actions are spent, and consequences at hand? Hee-hee. But this: I sat through darkness once before, lost my crew and lost my ship. I would not, could not endure it again, no indeed. Give me sweet oblivion first—death that ancient end. A far preferable fate to exile along the cold cliffs where souls wander and wither in isolation, each one a Boltzmann paradox, each one a torment of bad dreams. What is mind, no matter, what is matter, no mind and isolation the cruelest reduction of April and—”
A staticky burst interrupted him, and his voice faded from hearing, but Kira had already tuned him out. He was babbling again. She thought she understood what he’d been saying, but that wasn’t what concerned her. A few hours of isolation shouldn’t have unbalanced Gregorovich this much. There had to be another cause. What could affect a ship mind so strongly? Kira realized she didn’t have much of an idea.
Perhaps, if she steered the conversation toward calmer waters, she could get him into a better mindset and find out what the underlying problem was. Perhaps.
“Gregorovich … Gregorovich, can you hear me? If you’re there, answer me. What’s going on?”
After a moment, the ship mind answered with a tiny, far-off voice: “Kira … I don’t feel so good. I don’t … Everything is wrong ways round.”
She pressed the headphones tighter against her ears, trying to hear better. “Can you tell me what’s causing it?”
A faint laugh, growing louder. “Oh, are we in sharing and confessing mode now? Hmm? Is that it?” Another of his unsettling cackles. “Did I ever tell you why I decided to become a ship mind, O Inquisitive One?”
Kira hated to change the topic, but she didn’t want to upset him. As long as Gregorovich was willing to talk, she was willing to listen. “No, you didn’t,” she said.
The ship mind snorted. “Why, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, thatswhyisasisssss. Ah, the untempered idiocy of youth.… My body was slightly the worse for wear, you see (you don’t, but you do, oh yes). Several limbs were missing, and certain important organs too, and what I’m told was a spec-tacular amount of blood and fecal matter was smeared across the road. Black ribbon against black stone, red, red, red, and the sky a faded patch of pain. The only viable options were to be installed in a construct while a new body was grown for me or to transition into a ship mind. And I, in my arrogance and my ignorance, I decided to dare the unknown.”
“Even though you knew it was irreversible? Didn’t that bother you?” Kira regretted the questions as soon as she asked them; she didn’t want to unbalance him further. To her relief, Gregorovich took them well.
“I wasn’t so smart then as I am now. Oh, no, no, no. The only things I thought I would miss were hot splashes, sweet soft and savory and seductive spoonfuls and the pleasures of carnal company close held, deep felt, yes, and in both cases I reasoned, yes I reasoned, that VR would provide more-than-adequate substitute. Bits and bytes, bobs of binary, shadows of ideals melting starving on electrons, starving, starving … Were I wrong was I wrong? wrong wrong wrong, I could always avail myself of a construct to indulge in sensual delights as appealed to my fancy.”
Kira’s curiosity was sparked. “But why?” she said, in as soothing a voice as she could manage. “Why become a mind at all?”
Gregorovich laughed, and there was arrogance in his voice. “For the sheer thrill of it, of course. To become more than I was before and to bestride the stars as a colossus unbound by the confines of petty flesh.”
“It couldn’t have been an easy change, though,” said Kira. “One moment your life is going one way, and then just like that, an accident sends you in a completely different direction.” She was thinking more of herself than him.
“Who said it was an accident?”
She blinked. “I assumed—”
“The truth of it doesn’t matter, no it doesn’t. I had already considered volunteering to become a ship mind. Precipitous disassembly merely hastened a perilous decision. Change comes more naturally to some people than others. Monotony is boring, and besides, as the ancients loved to point out, expectations of what could be or what should be are the most common sources of our discontent. Expectations lead to disappointment, and disappointment leads to anger and resentment. And yes, I’m aware of the irony, delicious irony, but self-knowledge is no protection against folly, my Simpering Symbiotic. ’Tis flawed armor at best.” The more Gregorovich spoke, the calmer and saner he seemed.
Keep him talking. “If you could do it over again, would you still make the same choice?”
“With regard to becoming a ship mind, yes. Other choices, not so much. Fingers and toes and Mongolian bows.”
Kira frowned. A slip from him there. “Is there anything you miss from before? I was going to say ‘from when you had a body,’ but I suppose the Wallfish is your body.”
A hollow sigh echoed in her ears. “Freedom. That is what I miss. Freedom.”
“What do you mean?”
“All of known space is—or was—at my disposal. I can outrace light itself. I can dive into the atmosphere of a gas giant and bask in the aurora of Eidolon, and I have. But as you said, O Perceptive Little Vexation, the Wallfish is my body, and it shall remain my body until such a time (if such a time ever arrives) as I am removed. When we dock, you are free to walk away from the Wallfish and go where you will. But not I. Through cameras and sensors I can participate from a distance, but still I remain bound to the Wallfish, and the same would be true even if I had a construct I could remotely pilot. That much I miss, the freedom to move without restriction, to relocate myself of my own accord, sans fuss or hassle.… I have heard there is a ship mind on Stewart’s World who built himself a mech body ten meters high and who now spends his time wandering the uninhabited parts of the planet, painting landscapes of the mountains with a brush as tall as a person. I would like to have a body such as that someday. I would like it very much, although the probability of it seems low at the present.”
Gregorovich continued: “Could I advise myself in the past, prior to my transition, I would tell myself to make the most of what I had while I had it. Too often we don’t appreciate the value of something until it has slipped our grasp.”
“Sometimes that’s the only way we learn,” said Kira. She paused, struck by her own words.
“So it seems. The benighted tragedy of our species.”
“And yet, ignoring the future and/or wallowing in regret can be equally harmful.”
“Indeed. The important thing is to try and, by trying, to improve ourselves. Otherwise we might as well have never come down from the trees. But no point in maudlin navel-gazing when the navel is adrift, spinning and wildling and time all out of joint. I have a memoir to write, databases to purge, subroutines to rearrange, chyrons to design, enoptromancy to master, squares upon squares a wave or indivisible scintilla tell me tell me tell me—”
He seemed stuck in a mental rut, the phrase tell me, tell me repeating in her ears at different volumes. Kira frowned, frustrated. They’d been doing so well, but he couldn’t seem to maintain mental focus. “Gregorovich…” Then, more sharply than she intended, “Gregorovich!”
A welcome pause in his logorrhea, and then almost too faint to hear, “Kira, something isn’t right. Not right at allllll.”
“Can you—”
The chorus of howling voices roared back to full strength, making her wince and dial back the volume on her headphones.