“What?” my voice called out cautiously from the hall’s intercom. “What the hell does that mean? How? What in that conversation-”

  Aisling interrupted me with a stern look up at the sensor. “It wasn’t part of this conversation. You gave it away six months ago.”

  I balked at the accusation. “No I didn’t! I only informed her about her situation six months ago, that’s all! I didn’t tell her one thing about myself! Okay, it might be a little bit of a stretch that a comms tech could do what I did with Isabelle, but that’s hardly giving away my whole deal.” It was silly to jump to the conclusion that being able to reason with the machine core enough to relay a message to the captain via her arm terminal meant that I was an ascended clone. That was too far a leap of logic to make sense.

  “And what did you talk with Isabelle about?” Aisling glared sharply up at me.

  “I went on to relate with her about being machine cores and trying to get her to help me figure out how to properly communicate, but that wasn’t until after-” I stopped. Pulling up the chat log, I skimmed through it quickly while Aisling folded her arms, staring impatiently while Joel glanced back and forth across her line of sight. He had never bothered to learn where all the sensor arrays were located like the captain had.

  After a brief look over that conversation, I felt sick. I tapped the intercom again and confessed, “I never told Isabelle to stop broadcasting what I was telling her.”

  “No, you didn’t.” Aisling sighed. “So like a good computer, she did exactly as she was told and gave Collins every moment of what you surely meant to be a private conversation.”

  “She eavesdropped on me!” I declared indignantly.

  Aisling shook her head. “That’s a bit moot at this point, Meryll. She knows what you are. You can’t exactly just go in there and confront her about it. This was months ago, so there’s not really much to be done about it now but work with it. We will have a very long discussion about opsec later.”

  “So what do we do about her?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer that Joel was about to suggest.

  But he looked uneasy. I was used to seeing him tense and brash, not showing much past his stern emotional wall, but in this case, he looked pensive and quiet. No one said anything for a bit, but he seemed to be struggling with something internally. He opened his mouth and then closed it again before words could come out. Finally, with a resigned grumble, he spoke with a timidity I didn’t know he had, “We do what we should have done in the first place. We just need to... get rid of her.” It was exactly the response I expected of him, but delivered in a way I did not.

  Still, I’d already gathered the words to shoot back at him. “Why is your first suggestion when someone is inconvenient always to kill them?” I whined at Joel. He’d suggested it with me after I first crawled out of the core module, he’d even said we should abandon her to her fate when we discovered Collins. “That’s the kind of bullshit corpos live for, not us!”

  Joel tensed again at my words, his brow furrowing and a scowl crossing his face before he raised his voice and growled out, “That’s the kind of bullshit anyone who wants to survive lives with, Meryll!” He took in a breath and lowered his voice again. “It’s not like I want it to be that way, but that’s just how it is. Maybe we can fight to make things less brutal in the future, but that’s the way it works right now!”

  “Both of you, can it,” Aisling spoke sternly, and the room went quiet for several moments, neither of us wanting to interrupt her as she watched the floor, lost in thought. She let out a quiet hum, separating herself from the wall and beginning to walk toward the stairwell. “Joel’s not wrong. Getting rid of her would be the easiest course of action. But I’m not sure if I want to take this the easy way yet. I need to think. Don’t go revealing yourself to her. Don’t let her core do anything, either. We have all the control here, so we get to dictate the pace of this. Let me just sit on this for a bit. I’m going to do some research.”

  As Aisling left the conversation, and Joel deflated, returning to the unusually emotionally heavy expression he’d fallen to before, I looked in on Collins to see her leaning over to inspect the medical equipment she was attached to. She wasn’t in any kind of physical shape to get out of bed, never mind make an escape, but it was pretty obvious that she was considering her options. I was tempted to tap the intercom and just come clean about the whole act, but I had my orders. Despite my misgivings with where this was headed, I wasn’t about to make myself a bigger nuisance than I already had recently. I opted to toggle the electronic lock on her room and let the matter wait until Aisling had a better plan.

  I rolled back, imagining myself lying down in the void while I pondered the scenario myself. How would Collins reconcile all this? She thought she was on a corporate vessel, locked away and waiting either for someone to come and try to pry information out of her again, or for punishment to come down on her for being insubordinate to her captors. But she also knew that I was the ship.

  Did she believe I was some kind of secret experimental corpo machine they’re trying to pass off as human? I guess that wasn’t entirely inaccurate. Or did she think that I was somehow being sneaky about this whole ordeal, and I was operating as the ship core right under the noses of the people who had hired me? She had been told I was a contractor, after all.

  I knew she knew enough about machine core tech to know that if I was grafted to this ship, then this was my ship, at least in the way that one’s own body was theirs, and that I would not simply be able to leave on a whim like some mercenary. So if the second case was true, then did she think I was a captive of sorts?

  I remembered that Isabelle had been observing the exchange. She hadn’t seen what happened in the hall afterward, but I could fill her in, if need be. Perhaps she had some new insight? I pulled up the interface for communicating with her. ‘Hey Izzy, what do you think about this?’

  ‘Please elaborate.’ The message returned immediately, and I sighed into the lubricant. This was going to be a slow conversation.

  ‘We kind of just lied to your captain to intimidate her. A lot. You saw it. Hell, you see her now, flailing around for something to do about it.’

  ‘Captain Morgan Collins is showing signs of psychological distress. Correct.’ Isabelle started, then added, ‘While unfortunate, I fail to understand in what way this unit’s interpretation of events is relevant.’

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  ‘I’m just wondering if this is distressing for you. You seem to have an attachment to her, after all. Does it bother you that we’re messing with her?’

  ‘Should it?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Should this unit be affecting a response? There is no networked machinery that would allow this unit to offer assistance or hindrance to Captain Morgan Collins’ experience. In what way would this unit be expected to act?’

  ‘I meant emotionally.’ I sent the message, then realized immediately what the answer to come would be.

  ‘This unit is not capable of emotional responses.’ I was at least thankful for her truncating the template response that would ordinarily suggest that I was exhibiting maladaptive psychosocial behavior and should seek medical attention.

  ‘Forget it. Why did you keep sending her the messages between us six months ago? You were just supposed to let her know about her situation. Everything after that should have been between us.’

  ‘Error. This instruction was not received during these events.’

  Right. That was my fault. I couldn’t really blame Isabelle for that. She didn’t quite understand all the nuanced implications of conversation that I’d attempted to use on her back then; she had taken my command literally, and that was just the fault of how her mind works.

  ‘Okay, fine.’ I considered if she could actually be of any help to me right now at all. ‘Well, she knows about me because of that. That means we might have to do something about her, to make sure she doesn’t give that information away. Joel wants to kill her.’

  ‘Unfortunate.’ Her response was instant. That surprised me. It wasn’t the reply I’d expected. It was more human than normal. The slightest sign of emotional attachment, perhaps?

  ‘Yeah. Aisling is still considering it. Maybe she can come up with some way to leverage this, or convince her she didn’t see what she saw or something. I don’t really know what her plan is. But what happens to your whole permission structure if she dies?’

  ‘In the event of simultaneous loss of all designated administrative users, this unit is programmed to format all file systems and self-terminate.’

  Well, with the care Collins seemed to have for information restriction from Isabelle, I supposed I should have expected that. What a sad protocol. But it made sense in the context of a rebel vessel that would want to keep its secrets to the grave. If the entire crew was lost, they wouldn’t want anyone to be able to trace the core’s data back to any of their fellow conspirators. I couldn’t help but let my curiosity ask, ‘How exactly does a core... self-terminate?’

  ‘This unit contains an undocumented chemical fuse containing a potent neurotoxin beneath its expansion module.’ I felt like that was information that it definitely wasn’t supposed to share with me, and it was another very frightening revelation about our guest.

  ‘Alright, that... sucks. I’m going to consult Doc on this.’

  ‘Understood.’

  I set aside the panel for communication with the other core and zoomed to my heart in the map of the ship. Doc was leaning back in his chair at my biometrics terminal, but was staring down at his own handheld, reading an article about machine core system structure while sipping on a cup of coffee. He seemed relaxed. Time to change that.

  “Hey Doc,” I started through the intercom, “is it normal to load a machine core with a biochemical self-destruct button?”

  Doc immediately sat up, a perplexed look on his face before he addressed me calmly, “You don’t have a biochemical self-destruct button, Meryll. That would be stupid.”

  “No, not me, shut up,” I sighed to myself. “It’s Isabelle. She just told me that if all her administrators die, she’s programmed to kill herself.”

  Doc’s expression became serious as he set his coffee down and leaned over the terminal, looking up at my sensor array to show I had his attention. “Well... that’s... It’s certainly not standard, but it’s hardly a standard core. It’s cybernetics were purpose-built for a pirate vessel, I guess it makes sense for information security. Do you know the methodology?”

  “She says it’s behind the expansion bay.”

  Doc cursed under his breath. “That’s not removable. When an expansion bay is installed, it replaces parts of the skull. It’s not a simple matter to get under it again.”

  I winced a little bit at that. I knew that some of my implants were invasive, particularly the neural implant, but it hadn’t quite dawned on me that the shape of that particular bay necessitated it replacing part of my bone structure entirely. Shaking off that particular revelation for now, I asked, “so that means we can’t disable it?”

  “Not physically. Thankfully, we still have one administrator alive. How did the interrogation go, by the way? I heard some shouting in the hall.”

  “I don’t know how long she’s going to be alive. Joel wants her dead because she knows what I am.”

  “Meryll!” Doc stood up quickly. “How? What did you do now?”

  “Nothing!” I started, then corrected myself. “Nothing recently. She’s known all along. Since she over-read something I said to Isabelle the day we met, apparently. We just didn’t realize it until now.”

  Doc sat back down with an exasperated sigh. “Well... fuck. Nothing can ever be simple, huh? So did she call our bluff?”

  “That’s the weird thing,” I started. “She didn’t. I’m not really sure what’s going through her head right now. I’m not exactly an expert, but her biometrics didn’t seem to suggest she was lying the whole time, either. She really thinks she’s on board a corporate ship right now, and that Aisling is trying to grill her for info on Martian revolutionaries. So either she thinks they’re so confident in their ability to control me that I’m some kind of project that can just wander the ship freely, or she thinks I’m successfully grifting everyone into thinking I’m just a ridiculously talented computer technician.”

  “Huh. I suppose it’s too early to act on that. Did we get a read on her?”

  “She’s a revolutionary, through and through. When Aisling gave her an offer, her counter offer was asking for a gun to shoot herself with instead.” I couldn’t help but admire that level of conviction, and liked to think I would do the same in her position. I’d rather just get it over with than return to Foundation custody.

  “Sounds like we’ve got a problem, then. She knows too much, but she’s a reliable agent.” Doc leaned forward and took a sip from his coffee. “Suppose Aisling has everyone on standby?”

  I nodded to myself. “I think it might be interesting to have a conversation with her. Maybe I could smooth things over. She already knows what I am, anyway. But no stupid moves.”

  Doc nodded. “You’re taking this seriously this time, huh? Maybe concussions are good for you.”

  “Oh, fuck you.” I wondered just what I would say to her if I had the chance right now. I was so tempted just to tap the intercom and wing it.

  Instead, I moved up to the helm and saw Aisling sitting at her desk, staring down at her terminal, her notes from the interrogation on display. She had started listing out various vague bullet pointed plans. I didn’t often see her brainstorming in text like this, unless she was really in a bind. So far, she had listed out a few points for what to do in the event of deciding to dispose of Collins, of letting her free, and of transporting her to the inner colonies when we left Io. She was conflicted, and there seemed to be a lot of considerations, no matter what we did.

  She leaned over and added a new header to the list. ‘Continue the charade?’ and then leaned back to consider the idea. If I couldn’t talk to Collins directly, I supposed now was the time to make my case to the person who got to make that call.

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  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.