“Are they real?”
She looked shocked. “Gilly, this was a mental dexterity exercise. That’s all. And, you might have noticed, Anders is walking proof of why they’re useful.”
“Engagements are real,” Jackson said. “They’re the most real thing we do.”
“But we don’t do anything. We don’t even have to be at station, do we? All we do is monitor what the ship is doing. It decides where to go. It can fight without us. It doesn’t even . . .” He trailed off, because the words he was about to speak, he had actually said once before, to Beanfield, without realizing their implication. “It doesn’t even know we’re here.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” Jackson said. “Shit can break. When it does, you’re here to fix it.”
He looked at her. Nothing was going to break. The ship could diagnose and repair itself.
“It’s possible your swarm analysis is useful, too,” Beanfield said. “I mean, it’s all data for the ship. It may help it decide one way or the other.”
He closed his eyes. He couldn’t take much more of this.
“Gilly, there’s another really important reason we’re out here,” Beanfield said. “We’re a humanizing media presence.”
He stared. Then he looked at Jackson, because if that meant what he thought it did, he couldn’t believe she would tolerate it.
“Service needs human faces out here to sell the war effort. Not drones. Providences are expensive, Gilly. They don’t get built unless people pay for them. We help convince them that their sacrifice is worthwhile, via our feeds and interviews.”
“What?” he said.
“War is a lot of moving parts. This is one of them.”
He wanted this meeting to end. He wanted to lock himself in his cabin and not come out again. He’d thought he was someone, doing something.
“I’ll give you some time to think this out,” she said. “You want to hear something crazy, though? This could be a good thing. We can be really honest with each other now.” The corner of her lip curled. “And didn’t you always suspect? Even a little?”
“No,” he said.
* * *
—
But maybe he had. It seemed impossible that he’d missed it. He’d understood the capabilities of the AI. He’d known it could do everything he could, only better. How could he have avoided the logical conclusion—that everything he did was pointless—unless he’d wanted to?
He hadn’t beaten the ship to the pheromone theory, he saw now. He’d requested that it wait while he investigated. But it had wanted to move on immediately. Because it already knew what was happening, and what needed to be done.
Maybe they were right not to tell him, because now he was angry. The only thing that had kept him going at Camp Zero had been the idea that eventually he would get out and start to do things that mattered. So what now?
He stared at the wall of his cabin. He had two more years on this ship. He couldn’t think of how to fill the next fifteen minutes. “Shit,” he said, quietly. Maybe he really would turn out like Anders.
4
[Beanfield]
THE SHIP
Well,” she said, once Gilly had left. “That was unfortunate.”
Jackson shrugged fractionally. “He was always going to figure it out.”
Jackson, of course, had never seen the point of concealing the truth from Gilly. Jackson held the idea that you could tell someone what to do and they would go do it and that was that. This wasn’t even true with soldiers. “You’re probably right.”
“Service wastes too much time on that garbage,” Jackson said. “Feeds and mind games.”
“Mmm,” said Talia. And Life Officers, was the next part of that sentence.
“Gilly’s risking his life out here like the rest of us. He deserves the truth.”
“I suppose.”
“You don’t agree?”
The thing is, Jolene, not everyone on this ship is trying to flee survivor’s guilt. For normal people, being trillions of miles from home is kind of difficult. It’s kind of debilitating. Jackson was married. This was part of her sacrifice: She had waved