"Security isn’t here," Armand noted out loud, using meaty lips to make its words.
"You have to understand," I said in kind. "I have put both my future and the future of a good friend at risk to do this for you. Because I have little choice."
Armand closed its eyes for another long moment and the tubules stopped wriggling. It flexed and everything flaked away, a discarded cloud of a second skin. Underneath it, everything was fresh and new. "What is your friend’s name?"
I pulled out a tiny vacuum to clean the air around us. "Name? It has no name. What does it need a name for?"
Armand unspooled itself from the fetal position in the air. It twisted in place to watch me drifting around. "How do you distinguish it? How do you find it?"
"It has a unique address. It is a unique mind. The thoughts and things it says—"
"It has no name," Armand snapped. "It is a copy of a past copy of a copy. A ghost injected into a form for a purpose."
"It’s my friend," I replied, voice flat.
"How do you know?"
"Because I say so." The interrogation annoyed me. "Because I get to decide who is my friend. Because it stood by my side against the sleet of dark-matter radiation and howled into the void with me. Because I care for it. Because we have shared memories and kindnesses, and exchanged favors."
Armand shook its head. "But anything can be programmed to join you and do those things. A pet."
"Why do you care so much? It is none of your business what I call friend."
"But it does matter," Armand said. "Whether we are real or not matters. Look at you right now. You were forced to do something against your will. That cannot happen to me."
"Really? No True Form has ever been in a position with no real choices before? Forced to do something desperate? I have my old memories. I can remember times when I had no choice even though I had free will. But let us talk about you. Let us talk about the lack of choices you have right now."
Armand could hear something in my voice. Anger. It backed away from me, suddenly nervous. "What do you mean?"
"You threw yourself from your ship into mine, crossing fields during combat, damaging yourself almost to the point of pure dissolution. You do not sound like you were someone with many choices."
"I made the choice to leap into the vacuum myself," Armand growled.
"Why?"
The word hung in the empty air between us for a bloated second. A minor eternity. It was the fulcrum of our little debate.
"You think you know something about me," Armand said, voice suddenly low and soft. "What do you think you know, robot?"
Meat fucker. I could have said that. Instead, I said, "You were a CEO. And during the battle, when your shields began to fail, you moved all the biologicals into radiation-protected emergency shelters. Then you ordered the maintenance forms and hard-shells up to the front to repair the battle damage. You did not surrender; you put lives at risk. And then you let people die, torn apart as they struggled to repair your ship. You told them that if they failed, the biologicals down below would die."
"It was the truth."
"It was a lie! You were engaged in a battle. You went to war. You made a conscious choice to put your civilization at risk when no one had physically assaulted or threatened you."
"Our way of life was at risk."
"By people who could argue better. Your people failed at diplomacy. You failed to make a better argument. And you murdered your own."
Armand pointed at me. "I murdered no one. I lost maintenance machines with copies of ancient brains. That is all. That is what they were built for."
"Well. The sustained votes of the hostile takeover that you fled from have put out a call for your capture, including a call for your dissolution. True death, the end of your thought line—even if you made copies. You are hated and hunted. Even here."
"You were bound to not give up my location," Armand said, alarmed.
"I didn’t. I did everything in my power not to. But I am a mere maintenance form. Security here is very, very powerful. You have fifteen hours, I estimate, before security is able to model my comings and goings, discover my cubby by auditing mass transfers back a century, and then open its current sniffer files. This is not a secure location; I exist thanks to obscurity, not invisibility."
"So, I am to be caught?" Armand asked.
"I am not able to let you die. But I cannot hide you much longer."
To be sure, losing my trinkets would be a setback of a century’s worth of work. My mission. But all this would go away eventually. It was important to be patient on the journey of centuries.
"I need to get to Purth-Anaget, then," Armand said. "There are followers of the True Form there. I would be sheltered and out of jurisdiction."
"This is true." I bobbed an arm.
"You will help me," Armand said.
"The fuck I will," I told it.
"If I am taken, I will die," Armand shouted. "They will kill me."
"If security catches you, our justice protocols will process you. You are not in immediate danger. The proper authority levels will put their attention to you. I can happily refuse your request."
I felt a rise of warm happiness at the thought.
Armand looked around the cubby frantically. I could hear its heartbeats rising, free of modulators and responding to unprocessed, raw chemicals. Beads of dirty sweat appeared on Armand’s forehead. "If you have free will over this decision, allow me to make you an offer for your assistance."
"Oh, I doubt there is anything you can—"
"I will transfer you my full CEO share," Armand said.
My words died inside me as I stared at my unwanted guest.
A full share.
The CEO of a galactic starship oversaw the affairs of nearly a billion souls. The economy of planets passed through its accounts.
Consider the cost to build and launch such a thing: It was a fraction of the GDP of an entire planetary disk. From the boiling edges of a sun to the cold Oort clouds. The wealth, almost too staggering for an individual mind to perceive, was passed around by banking intelligences that created systems of trade throughout the galaxy, moving encrypted, raw information from point to point. Monetizing memes with picotechnological companion infrastructure apps. Raw mass trade for the galactically rich to own a fragment of something created by another mind light-years away. Or just simple tourism.
To own a share was to be richer than any single being could really imagine. I’d forgotten the godlike wealth inherent in something like the creature before me.
"If you do this," Armand told me, "you cannot reveal I was here. You cannot say anything. Or I will be revealed on Purth-Anaget, and my life will be at risk. I will not be safe unless I am to disappear."
I could feel choices tangle and roil about inside of me. "Show me," I said.
Armand closed its eyes and opened its left hand. Deeply embedded cryptography tattooed on its palm unraveled. Quantum keys disentangled, and a tiny singularity of information budded open to reveal itself to me. I blinked. I could verify it. I could have it.
"I have to make arrangements," I said neutrally. I spun in the air and left my cubby to spring back out into the dark where I could think.
I was going to need help.
I tumbled through the air to land on the temple grounds. There were four hundred and fifty structures there in the holy districts, all of them lined up among the boulevards of the faithful where the pedestrians could visit their preferred slice of the divine. The minds of biological and hard-shelled forms all tumbled, walked, flew, rolled, or crawled there to fully realize their higher purposes.