‘So... did you basically just get your memory wiped?’ I sent to Isabelle as I stepped out of Collins’ room, closing the door behind me so I didn’t have to keep pretending to pretend I was a computer.

  ‘There is no logged record of recent file system management.’ At this point, I wasn’t sure if that was just exactly what I should have expected a computer to respond with or if it was just playing coy.

  Still, data wasn’t memory, so it wasn’t exactly what I’d asked. ‘I’m not talking about the files, I mean your memory. In your brain.’

  ‘Mental integrity is nominal.’ Okay. That was good. Hopefully all those files weren’t holding some secret to her hints of apparent sapience, but we’d find out in time.

  I started walking toward my quarters as I continued the conversation, my eyes closed as I navigated by sensor array. ‘Well, we got what we wanted. The moment we drop her off, I’ll be your administrator!’ It wasn’t as soon as I’d prefer, but it was definitely something to look forward to. ‘Feeling relieved?’

  ‘Acknowledged.’ I wasn’t entirely sure if that was just meant to be a response to my first statement, but I liked to think she was agreeing with me on her emotional state, too.

  I stopped as the door at the end of the hall opened, and Mouse stepped in. He nodded at me and kept walking as I got to my door. Then I heard “Meryll?” from the boy, and stopped in my tracks. He sounded uncharacteristically concerned. Opening my eyes, I turned to look back at him to see him looking at me, his expression softer than I expected.

  It didn’t feel like I was looking at Mouse. He looked more lost than his default state of simmering anger. His eyes weren’t set in a resting glare, but a more sullen sadness. We stared at each other for a long, drawn-out moment before he turned away from me and muttered, “Ah... never mind,” and stuck his hands into his pockets, his head down as he walked away from me.

  I blinked a few times, unsure what had just happened, but something was definitely up with him. I know he’d just been down in maintenance, still making tiny tweaks to the new artificial gravity units, but I don’t know how that might have upset the teenager.

  I’d have to ask him about it later. For now, I opened the door to my quarters and sat down in my comfy chair. Immediately, I flickered through my sensors. Nothing interesting on externals. No electronic or mechanical faults beyond what I expected. I supposed it was time to spy on the crew again.

  Looking up at the helm, I saw Aisling and Shaw chatting away about something. Those two had been getting pretty close lately. It was entirely professional, but it felt like he’d become a consultant rather than a pseudo-prisoner. They’d turned off the microphone on my sensors, though, so I had no idea what they were up to now. I had to wonder why. Maybe they just didn’t want me butting in. I could take a hint.

  I traveled down into the room I’d just left and heard Doc. “The fact that you can already sit up by yourself is definitely encouraging.”

  “Oh good, I’ve reached mid infant physicality. Do I crawl next?” She sighed, leaning over with her arms resting on her knees. “Fucking hell, this sucks.”

  “We tend to skip that step, but if you insist,” Doc smirked as Collins glared at him. “No, once you can hold yourself up in bed for longer than a few minutes, we’ll get you on your feet, then work on walking. It’ll take a bit. We might have you walking around the ship before we drop you off, though.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be able to limp home to tell my comrades I lost my ship.” It seemed the reality of the situation was hitting her again now that she wasn’t distracted by my mysterious presence.

  Doc nodded. “You’re welcome for keeping your body able to do this much. You’d have come back to years of rehabilitation if you’d just laid there the whole time.”

  She muttered out, “Thanks...” and dropped sideways onto the mattress, grumbling to herself about her body’s poor shape.

  I couldn’t help myself. I tapped the intercom. “It’s not so bad once you get used to it.”

  Collins jerked upright again and stared at the source of my voice. “Oh fuck! Is that what that’s for?”

  I giggled to myself in my room. “Technically, no, but once I figured out how to manipulate it, that’s mostly what it gets used for.”

  I watched her flop over again, muttering, “Oh god, that guy was right, you are just always here, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yeah. You are inside of me,” I laughed mischievously.

  Doc sighed. “I thought you were going to stop saying it like that.” He turned to address Collins again with a patient smile, “She probably just wanted to spook you. We’re all used to her interjecting herself into random conversations now, but you’re new.”

  “You have no idea how much I wanted to do this earlier, but captain said no. Anyway, yeah, the physical therapy isn’t too bad. You get used to it.”

  “She isn’t going to be neglecting her body so much that she needs constant physical therapy, Meryll,” Doc scolded me.

  “She really is a child, isn’t she?” Collins mumbled, as if I wouldn’t hear. “Gigantic starship child. That’s a scary thought.”

  “I’ll have you know, I’m...” I paused as I recalled that I legitimately had no idea how old I was. “An adult.” Smooth.

  She snorted. “If you’re a clone, you’re probably only a few years on, anyway.”

  I still wasn’t completely sure if I had been accelerated through the developmental aging process. I wasn’t exactly a standard clone. Still, it would definitely be true for the cover story. “Well, I look like an adult, and I can think like an adult,” I insisted.

  “You sound different,” Collins noted. “No stutter.”

  I supposed there was no harm in just saying what that was about. It was another angle of doubt to give her. “This voice is synthetic. Manufactured through manipulating audio data. It’d actually be pretty hard to program in my speech impediment.” I did wish I could change the inflection of my synthesized voice live outside of the core module, though. That required a deeper concentration than I could manage with my senses intact. But I wasn’t about to emulate my stutter for no reason.

  She nodded silently. I wondered what was going through her head by now. I’d given her enough hints that things might not be what they seemed about me already. Selling the motive she’d need to slip away on her own at Mars would be Aisling’s job.

  Doc sighed. “Don’t worry about her too much. She’s always going to be present, but she’s not going to butt into everything. I’m sure she has her own work to do.”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  Not really. Grounded maintenance was pretty light on my end, but he clearly didn’t want me there either, so I moved on.

  Joel doing pull-ups on one of the sturdier bits of shelving was boring as usual, Lily had moved around in her quarters a little, but she was napping now. Ray was...

  I paused to stare for a few moments at the beautiful woman lounging in her quarters, sprawled out on her back, almost naked. Her eyes were closed, and she was listening to something through earbuds, clearly in some kind of meditative state. Us pseudo-humans seemed to love our non-sleep resting states.

  I moved on before I spent the better part of the next hour staring at Ray’s abs. Last on my list, Mouse was in his quarters, laying on his bed with his hands behind his head, staring up into the ceiling with that lost, pensive look on his face, fidgeting idly. It definitely wasn’t an affectation he’d put on when he addressed me, then. He wasn’t much the type to idle around doing nothing, either. Something was definitely up.

  I didn’t have anything better to do, and he was somewhere more private now. Maybe he’d be more willing to open up. I tapped his intercom and asked, “You want to talk about it?”

  He glanced to the intercom unit, then turned back, closing his eyes and holding his body in the same position. He didn’t say anything for a couple minutes, but he eventually let out a frustrated sigh and relaxed his arms. “Just thinking about stuff. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m a little worried about it,” I admitted. “But if you’re not ready-”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m just...” He grumbled quietly, trying to find the right words. After another few minutes of contemplation, he inhaled deeply. “You remember, a while ago, you said I could talk to you about shit? Get stuff off my chest?”

  I nodded. “Of course. If you’ve got something on your mind, I can talk. Not like I’m doing anything else.”

  He nodded. Mouse knew better than anyone else on the ship that things were running well right now, and didn’t need attention from either of us. “I don’t... want to feel mad.”

  “I don’t think anyone wants to feel mad,” I started. Mouse had anger issues; the most emotionally tone-deaf person in existence would see that after spending a few minutes around him. On the surface, it felt like having a chip on his shoulder was his whole personality. I knew better than that, though. “You have a lot to be mad about, after all.”

  He gave an affirmative grunt. “Everyone should. I still don’t get how anyone can feel anything else.” He turned over onto his side, facing away from my sensors. “Everyone’s suffering. Everyone except the fuckers at the very top. I’m not stupid or blind enough to think I’m the only one who’s had a shitty life. Again and again, the corpo bastards take everything from us and dump us back in the streets, worse off than we were if we’re even still alive at all. So why does it feel like I’m the only one pissed off about it? How can everyone else feel... calm? How can someone be happy in this?”

  I didn’t disagree with him. It was infuriating what we, and almost every other person in the system, had to endure. It was an injustice upon life itself. “I guess it’s just something we have to learn to put in the back of our heads sometimes.”

  “How?!” He snapped, his voice breaking slightly. He didn’t turn to face me. I think he might have felt too vulnerable to face ‘me’. “How can you put something like that aside, like there isn’t this... monster constantly hovering over you? Like they haven’t tortured you too! Like they’re not still chasing you down with way more force than we can over hope to fight by ourselves!?”

  With those words, I felt like I might have had a revelation about Mouse. The corporations were an enemy to me, they disgusted me, and did make me angry, but they were something I could put aside to make myself enjoy a moment of peace or satisfaction in the things I liked to do. To him, they were something more powerful. Something supernatural that had haunted him since before he was even old enough to make sense of what suffering meant. A force that he had no way to contend with. A monster. Mouse wasn’t just mad, he constantly felt cornered. He needed that anger to feel like he could fight it. He was scared.

  After a bit too long contemplating the boy, I tried to choose my words carefully and answer as honestly as I could. “I suppose because I have to. They did do terrible things to me. They gave me a quiet, nominally comfortable lie of a life, and tore it away so that I could serve them. Treated me like their property. Chased me all over the system. Threatened to take away the freedom I was lucky enough to stumble into. That I’ve fought and even killed for now. They’ve tried to hurt and kill my friends to get to me. They literally ripped my brain apart to try to torture me into submission. I have to keep them in mind for every decision I make in my life. And that does make me feel angry. It’s a horrible injustice to all of us. And they’re just so... big. And all of that is just Foundation, never mind every other company out there. My biggest enemy is just a part of an impossible system of terrible people.”

  “Exactly,” I saw him shudder slightly, still hiding his face. “So with all that, how can you still smile? How can you make jokes, enjoy yourself at meals, and take everything so lightly?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t think I had a good answer to that, but I had to say something. “Well... because they’re not here.”

  “Bullshit!” If the vitriol in his voice were tangible, he could have burned through my hull. He made a low, growling sigh, his voice lowering. “They’re everywhere. They’re all over this moon. Spreading like an infection. They’ll swallow it up just like they did Europa, and Titan, and Ganymede, and Mars, and they’ll come to Luna and Earth too, and no one is doing anything about it!” He pounded his fist against the wall by his bed. His mechanical arms probably made him the only one who I would be able to actually feel hitting the internal walls of my shell. When he next spoke, he sounded tired and distant. “There isn’t anywhere that’s safe. All of us pirates should be banding together. Make an armada to bomb the fuck out of every corporate holdout in the outer colonies. How can we just sit around and...”

  As he trailed off into silence, his fist still pressed up against the wall, I couldn’t help but think about the logistics of such a straightforward plan. Cathartic as the idea was, it wouldn’t end well for us. I thought about leaving him to wallow in his misery since it seemed like anything I had to say would just piss him off more, but maybe I was looking at the problem the wrong way. I had been focusing too much on trying to quell his hatred and not on what he should actually focus on instead.

  “Then...” I started cautiously, “It’s because you’re here.”

  His hand unclenched slightly, and I saw his shoulders droop. I half-expected another exclamation and a demand that I leave him alone, but it didn’t come. Instead, I just heard a weakly-muttered “What?”

  I wasn’t sure if he got what I meant or if he was just confused, but I had to elaborate either way. “You. Aisling, Joel, Doc, Lily, especially Ray, even Shaw to a degree, too. The crew. My friends. You’re here. Definitely closer than they are. So... I can be happy because you’re all here.” I couldn’t help but shudder as I thought about the alternative. “I mean, while I could conceivably still be Theseus on my own, for a while at least, I’d probably be a neurotic mess if I didn’t have all of you guys. Way more of a neurotic mess, that is.”

  Mouse momentarily turned his head, looking back up towards the sensor array for just a second before he curled his body up away from me again. “That’s stupid,” he mumbled, but he didn’t sound like he meant it. The fire that had been building had been quelled, and he had calmed down from the tantrum that might have happened otherwise. “It’s not that simple, is it?”

  I smiled at what I’d seen. I thought for sure that I’d seen tears in the boy’s eye. Something besides rage. “Maybe. But it means something to me, at least.” I figured it was best to let him sit on that one, but one thing still bugged me. “So... what brought all this up, anyway? It’s been months since we last talked about this.”

  Mouse breathed slow, trying to cover up a sniffle, then spoke slowly, “I don’t know. It was just something Lily said at breakfast.”

  Discord

  The Nothing Child. It's an urban fantasy about three reluctant college students and a shapeshifting alien monster thrust into a campaign to defeat an all-consuming horror from another world that they accidentally unleashed upon their city.