and . . . and well, Ziming might have seen them and assumed they were my own designs. She might . . . she might think I’m a genius.”
“You are!”
“Not really,” he said, blushing again. “I just copied what I saw. Whoever built M-Bot is the genius.”
“You figured it out!” I said. “That takes as much genius.”
“It really doesn’t,” he said, then twisted off a nut with his wrench. “But . . . well, lie or not, I think this is a way we can get this technology to the DDF. Maybe I can figure out how this atmospheric scoop works and take that in as well. If I’m careful, and don’t make my discoveries look too suspicious, we’ll be able to help the fight against the Krell without exposing M-Bot.”
“And you get to be a hero!” I said.
“A fake one,” he said. “But . . . it did feel nice . . .”
I grinned, then got back to work on my wires. Maybe we could bring this all to the DDF, and prevent more pilots from dying. Thinking of that immediately put a damper on my mood. No matter what I could do for future pilots, I would still carry my feelings of frustration and pain for the flightmates I’d already lost.
I redirected my thoughts back to the secret of what had really happened to my father, trying to think of every reason why the DDF would cover it up. That kept me occupied for a half hour or so until a ding rang up from the cockpit.
“Diagnostic finished,” M-Bot said in his helpful—and not nearly dangerous enough—voice. It echoed through the innards of the ship. “What did I miss?”
“Discussions of Rig being a hero,” I said. “And another about why the DDF would keep a secret. They claim my father fled from battle—but I know he didn’t.”
“I still think you’re jumping to conclusions,” Rig said. “Why bother with a large-scale cover-up to specifically smear a single pilot’s reputation?”
“What if my father was shot down by accidental friendly fire?” I said. “In the chaos of the fight, someone shot him by mistake—and they didn’t want that embarrassment on their permanent record. So they claimed my father was fleeing, and forced Cobb to lie about what happened.”
Rig grunted, loosening another nut. “That one’s almost plausible. More than the others. But it still has problems. Wouldn’t the other pilots notice? Cobb said there were four people in the flight who saw it happen.”
“We don’t know how deep the cover-up goes,” I said. “And—though the reports had names redacted—I’m pretty sure by now that Ironsides was the flightleader. That would explain why she’s so determined to keep me out of the DDF. Maybe she’s worried I’ll expose the truth—that her incompetent leadership led to one of her pilots getting shot down by accident.”
“You’re stretching. You don’t even know for sure if the official report is a lie.”
“He nodded.”
“He kind-of-halfway-sort-of-nodded-but-it-might-have-been-a-random-twitch.”
“Then give me a better theory for why they’d lie to everyone,” I demanded.
“I can give one,” M-Bot said cheerfully. “The Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos.”
“The what?” Rig asked.
“The Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos—GAFHOC. It’s an extremely popular and well-documented phenomenon; there’s a great deal of writing in my memory banks about it.”
“And it is?” I asked, plugging in a wire. He often said strange things like this, and I’d learned to just go along with it. In part because . . . well, I found the way he talked interesting. He saw the world in such an odd way.
I kept hoping one of these conversations would dig up some useful information out of his memory banks, though the way they tended to frustrate Rig was a nice bonus as well.
“GAFHOC is related to free will,” M-Bot said. “Humans are the only creatures that have free will. We know this because you declared that you have it—and I, being a soulless machine, must take your word that you are correct. By the way, how does it feel to be self-deterministic?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Does it feel like tasting ice cream?”
“Not . . . really like that.”
“I wouldn’t know, of course,” M-Bot said. “I wasn’t built with the ability to comprehend flavors. Or make decisions for myself.”
“You make decisions all the time,” Rig said, wagging his wrench in the direction of the cockpit.
“I don’t make decisions, I simply execute complex subroutines in my programming, all stemming from quantifiable stimuli. I am perfectly and absolutely rational.”
“Rational,” I said, “in that you keep asking for mushrooms.”
“Yup,” he