“The ship doesn’t lie.” There was so much insanity built into the assumptions of that comment, he didn’t know where to start. “It has only the most basic concept of our existence. It can’t imagine what we’re thinking, let alone know how to fool us.”
“You’re sure you went to the right deck,” Anders said.
“Yes.”
“I’m not saying you’re crazy. But you did spend months trying to fix imaginary valve leaks.”
Jackson was silent a moment. “Check it.”
“It’s not there,” Gilly said as Anders left. “I even took off my film.”
“Why?” Beanfield said.
“Because I thought it might be a puzzle.”
“Oh,” she said. “No, this one’s not us.”
“Are the other Engineering areas accessible?” Jackson asked. “Eng-12, Eng-14?”
“Yes.”
“So Eng-13 is still there, missing a door.”
“Right.”
“Or the ship deconstructed the room and is lying about it.”
“The ship doesn’t lie,” Gilly said. “It has no reason to.”
“It also doesn’t hide doors, was my understanding until five minutes ago.”
“Okay,” he conceded.
“So the question is why.”
“We can’t know that.”
“Explain that deeply unsatisfying answer,” Jackson said.
“Because it doesn’t think like we do. When we try to put ourselves in its shoes, we can’t help anthropomorphizing and imagining human motivations. Which is wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Inaccurate. Misleading.”
“Well,” Jackson said, “I want to know where my door went.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Beanfield said.
They looked at her. Gilly said, “Not to me.”
“I get what you’re saying about anthropomorphizing,” Beanfield said. “But you attacked it. Isn’t it natural for it to protect itself?”
“What?”
“You drilled into its brain. When you were taking the core offline.”
He stared at her.
“I mean,” she said, “isn’t this what the ship does? Learn from experience, so it’s better at defending itself the next time?”
He felt genuinely at a loss for words.
“Interesting,” Jackson said.
“I was forcing recognition of a faulty core bank. I was helping.”
“Sure,” Beanfield said, “but you can imagine the ship might not see it that way, right?”
He could not imagine it. Or maybe he didn’t want to. The idea felt grossly offensive in some way he couldn’t specify. He had been fixing a machine part.
“I’m not saying it’s angry or anything,” Beanfield said. “Just that, logically, it might want to keep you out of there so it doesn’t get drilled again.”
He looked at Jackson, who said nothing.
“Hey,” Anders said on comms. “Guess what? Gilly’s right. There’s no door.”
“Thank you,” Gilly said.
There was a rap rap rap; Anders knocking on the wall. “Weird,” Anders said.
* * *
—
The ship cut engines and coasted for two more days. They had never done this before and everyone projected their own assumptions onto it. “We’re retreating,” Beanfield said. “We’re getting ready to skip out of VZ.” She was hanging around while Gilly tried to burn through the wall with a plasma cutter to see whether Eng-13 was still there. So far, he had produced heat and light but no answers.
He sat back on his heels and studied the wall. “I don’t know about that.”
“No? We encountered a new weapon, took major damage, and developed intel about salamander information transmission. You don’t think it’ll want to relay that back to Service?”
Gilly didn’t say anything.
“Sure, okay,” Beanfield said. “We can’t guess what an AI is thinking. But even so.”
He poked at the wall with a gloved finger.
“Anything?”
“This is dense. Similar to the exterior hull. I can’t pierce it with these tools.”
“Is there something else you could use?”
“In the small-arms lockers, maybe.”
“Hmm,” Beanfield said. “Let’s not go shooting the ship, is my thinking.”
“Agreed,” he said.
“I mean, it’s not like we absolutely have to get in there.”