By the time we were back in the familiar and tight confines of the Helium Glider, I was absolutely exhausted. The pain in my arm, which had been mostly manageable for the dinner with my parents, had started to flare up with increasing magnitude on the walk back. Worse, all those other little aches and pains were starting to make themselves known with a vengeance. Nothing messes up a sorta-girl’s exoskeleton like high gravity, I guess.

Dr. Erobosh was the only one there to greet us; he had grown tired of the station and gone back to do some maintenance, while Miri and Quinn were off having more adventures. My parents immediately wanted to go out and find those two, to prevent a repeat of the Nahoroth incident. Normally I would have been all for finding them, but as I mentally prepared myself for another walk it became very obvious that I didn’t have it in me. I was tired, weirdly so, and it would definitely hurt my knees, my wing-joints, and my back if I had to do any more walking. So, trying to ward off any concern with a pleasant face, I told them that I’d stay behind. 

For the next half an hour, I didn’t have the motivation to even get out of bed. I was tired, mentally more than physically, and I was sore. But I was also bored: I’d spent vastly too much time over the last few days just studying Emissarine or doing sketches. I was tired of idleness. So I climbed out of bed with a lot of minor aches and pains. I realized with a bit of concern that I almost felt the need for a cane, which was something I was supposed to be way too young for. 

Dr. Erobosh was down in the engineering deck, which I thought was going to be a challenge. But when I pulled open the hatch, to much complaint from my joints, I found something new in the corridor, opposite the ladder. It was a sort of a large plate propped up against the wall, with a bunch of plastic flexible straps pressed between it and the wall.

“What’s this?” I said. 

Dr. Erobosh’s voice was echoing and tinny from down in engineering. “Click the button on the right side; it’s an elevator of sorts, for people who can’t use the ladder.”

I did so, craning my neck around to find the button in question. The moment I pressed it, the plate unfolded into a seat, attached to a metal climber frame, with a series of buckles and belts for strapping yourself in and folding armrests on either side. “Well, this would have been really freaking useful to have earlier.” I said.

“Yes, it would have,” Dr. Erobosh said. He sounded sad, a little regretful. “I’d been promising myself to repair it for months, and your accident was just the motivation I needed to do that. Tell me if it’s comfortable, won’t you?”

It was relatively easy to maneuver into the seat, though I imagined that I had it a bit easier with fully functioning legs. The button to activate it was just under one of the armrests, and once I’d pressed it the ride down was surprisingly smooth, taking maybe ten seconds. I stood up at the bottom to see Dr. Erobosh standing, leaned up against one of the consoles, and looking completely beat. 

“Xara? Is everything alright?”

“Hm? Oh, yes, I’m fine,” he said.

“You don’t look fine. Nor do you sound fine, for that matter.” I glanced at the panel he was resting against; it read Primary AI Interface. “Do you need any help?.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I’m just tired. It’s something people your age don’t really understand. Everything that’s happened in my life, building up and building up like scum in a reactor pool until it feels like carrying around a stuffed backpack.”

“Mmm. That must suck. How long do Architects live, anyway?”

“Around the same length of time as Liberates, I think. We aren’t all that dissimilar: large-brained tree-dwelling pack foragers with agile manipulating fingers.” Dr. Erobosh wiggled his long multi-jointed fingers for emphasis. 

I, meanwhile, was having a minor crisis. “How long do Emissaries live?”

He paused momentarily, squinting through the mask. “Slightly less than twice as long. Average lifespan without anti-agathic treatments of… one hundred and forty years, I think?”

I felt like I’d had the breath knocked out of me. While the changes to my body were major, and had changed everything, I was still the same person in a philosophical sense. I would still do the same things I had done before, have the same outlook on life. But the idea that I might have nearly twice the lifespan spread out before me… that shifted things.

“Wow,” I said. “Really?”

“Don’t be too impressed. Most Pioneers will live to see four hundred.”

I nodded. “No wonder there are so many of them.”

Dr. Erobosh chuckled. “One of the youngest newcomers on the galactic scene and they suddenly explode into prominence in a way none others have before, purely by virtue of being very tough crabs. The Architects built footholds on two planets in the time it took for them to splinter into a thousand nations.”

“Were the Emissaries very common? Before… everything.”

“Fairly so. They didn’t tend to spread out in quite the way the Pioneers did; they had their region of space, a couple hundred settled planets, but apparently they had already explored the rest of it and decided it wasn’t worth interfering with. There was a diaspora, of course; still is. But you didn’t really see Emissary planets outside of Emissary space.”

“What do you mean, they’d already explored the rest of it?” I said.

“I mean they’d already explored the rest of it,” he repeated. “The Emissaries are… maybe not the oldest, what with the Coeval and the Dominators, but certainly much older as spacefarers than the Liberates, the Ember, or my own people. They’ve been sailing the hyperstreams for… five, maybe six thousand years? So long that the earliest Emissary explorations have been lost to record, relegated to archaeology instead of history.”

I nodded in that way that’s meant to imply “damn, that’s deep,” though I had no clue if Xara got what I meant. With nothing else coming to mind to talk about, I circled the central reactor for a handful of steps, running my upper left hand over the smooth, cold metal. I stopped at the torn-open console of Coil Control #3. The memory of the pain in my arm piled on top of the actual pain from my actual arm, and for a moment it overwhelmed my composure enough to make me wince. 

“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Erobosh.

“There’s nothing to apologize for. It was the computer that freaked out, not you.”

“Except that I designed that computer,” he said, “so the fault is to some degree mine.”

“You designed Helium? And here I was already thinking you were a genius.”

“Alright, I exaggerate. It’s a standard model, but I did much of the initial programming. I was the one who made her nonstandard in the way she is.”

“Nonstandard?” I asked. “You mean how she’s… young?”

Dr. Erobosh nodded. “The core personality is modeled on a girl of age eleven. I had previously assumed that, with her intellectual and emotional centers being primarily built from the computer’s default programming, that the childishness would be entirely aesthetic. I see now that that might not be the case.”

“Is she shut off?” I asked.

“No, that would be a step too far,” Erobosh said defensively. “She has merely been cut off from full control of the ship until I can make sure she won’t put us in danger again.”

There was something that had been nagging at me ever since I set foot on the ship, but which I hadn’t been wanting to ask out of politeness, as well as slight fear about the response I’d get. “Why’d you make her like that, anyway? I like you, Xara, but I’m not going to lie: making your ship’s computer a little girl is… kind of creepy.”

Dr. Erobosh stiffened, and I could see his jaw clench through the mask. Sighing, he said, “It’s… a private thing. I liked the idea of having a child’s perspective on the wonders of space. Not so much the idea of bringing a child along with me. It was much more helpful before you came along.”

Curious, and still remembering what had happened during dinner, I turned my antennae his way. Architects smelled different from humans. It was in the same pitch, if I had to put words to it, but the riff was completely different. Architects smelled like plastic, which made sense given that most of their bodies were made from it. But there was something off about him, a disturbance in the cloud of pheromones, evaporating sweat and saliva, and other organic things that I was becoming increasingly aware all living creatures were spreading around at all times. He smelled blue-grey, slightly burnt, a little bit like an abandoned ambition with a whiff of broken glass. In other words, not the smell of someone who was feeling happy.

It was then that it hit me that I was almost definitely learning how to smell people’s emotions. What the fuck?

“I’m sorry about whatever happened,” I said. “I won’t pry further.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Do you mind if I ask a question of you, then?” I shook my head. “Why are you always wearing that thing around on your neck?”

It took me a second to realize that he was talking about the Waterspindle; I’d worn it so much that it had blended into the background. “Because I like it. It… it’s just a comfort item, you know? It’s a good feeling to have under my fingers.”

“Interesting,” he said. “I would have thought that you didn’t want a reminder of what happened on that moon.”

The reminder went through me like a static buildup. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.  Not even close. The image of the spectrademon falling, bleeding, dying, played in my head like a video. My stomach suddenly erupted into awful, swirling sickness. “I… yeah, I guess not. But this isn’t… it isn’t… it isn’t supposed to be a reminder of that. It’s just a nice thing, I don’t—”

“There’s no need to panic,” Dr. Erobosh said assertively. “You’re allowed your idiosyncrasies without having to think about your own traumas. Now that we’ve both given each other flashbacks, would you mind helping me with Helium?”

I was taken aback, both by how casually he was taking everything going on, as well as by how much his simple reassurance actually helped calm me down. “Of course, any time. What do you need me to do?”

He was creating training algorithms for Helium, which would hopefully help her learn to remain calm under pressure, without necessitating her entire personality be forcibly rewritten. After the first ten minutes or so, not even I could miss the fact that Dr. Erobosh didn’t need my help at all. I was there to learn. And I did learn, at least in very basic terms, how to deal with glitches and problematic behavior in AI constructs. When he was finished with the work, I actually felt like I could deal with similar problems on my own. 

Once I was back up the ladder and in my room, the first thing I did was go for that stupid instruction manual. It may not have been great for self-esteem reading about myself in the third person, and it may not have been helpful with the whole “gender” thing, but I knew it still had some good information. Sure enough, right there in the index was a section about “olfactory senses and empathy” which sounded like exactly what I was looking for. 

I read that section three or four times over, even though it was a hefty six pages. The gist of it was what I’d already begun to guess: Emissaries have highly adept senses of smell, thanks to the antennae and certain brain structures. Chemical-based life, which is most life, moderates its own bodily processes through a network of hormones and neurotransmitters, which either respond to emotions, or else make up the sensation we call “emotion,” depending on who you ask. But, inevitably, those cocktails of hormones and other odd little chemicals spill out through bodily orifices, sweat, and simple osmosis with the air. Which means that Emissaries can smell them, because Emissaries can smell damn near anything. 

The book then went on to explain how sensing emotions through smell required practice, but could be an invaluable skill, because it is basically impossible for any creature to suppress its emotions that way. The later portions of the chapter suggested exercises on how to refine this skill (mostly noting which odors paired with which emotions, asking how people were feeling, etc.), before ending with a warning about how most species took that kind of thing as invasive. Thanks, book. I had no idea before that. 

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized the potential of what I was discovering. I could tell what emotions a person was feeling just by being around them. This was a power I had never had before. Oh sure, if someone was screaming I knew they were angry, if they were crying I could guess they were sad, if they were laughing I was fairly sure they were happy, and so on. But it had always been mostly beyond my abilities to tell how someone was feeling just from the expression on their face, or the way they carried themself, at least not with any accuracy. But with the Emissary olfactory sense… that could change. I could walk into a conversation, do a quick scan of each person involved, and instantly understand the subtextual dynamics involved. When someone returned from errands, I could feel how well things had gone without asking, in a matter of seconds. When I was with a partner, I could know if they were getting down, possibly before even they did, and perk them up in whatever way I knew how. To most people I’m fairly sure that that sort of thing is commonplace, but as I laid back in bed it felt as though I’d unlocked a new superpower. I guess that’s autism for you.

The next hour was spent doing what anyone would do in that situation: inventing contrived scenarios in my head where I could surprise friends with my newfound emotion-sensing powers, to much praise and thanks. Not knowing people’s moods had been the source of several arguments with friends, and a near-breakup with Miri, and the prospect of never having to deal with that ever again was… tempting. When imagining my future triumphs lost its luster, I took a nap until I accidentally rolled over onto my broken arm. The pain was too much to fall back asleep, soI went back to downloading and watching TV from the port’s servers. All in all? A good couple of hours.

And then that couple of hours turned into several, and day turned into artificial night, and before I knew it the couple of hours had turned into a couple of days. New updates from the fleet carried much the same information as the last one: delays were everywhere, and we’d have to hold out just a bit longer until the fleet would arrive and we could all plan our next move. 

That next morning, Arana was out meeting up with a few other ships, mostly small cruisers and the like, that had also managed to escape whatever was causing the delays. The station’s mood had changed slightly as the news of the coming meeting percolated. It was still run-down and shitty, but there was at least some effort going into it, as the administrators rushed around the corridors trying to get everything up to snuff. I expressed some concern to Arana about whether this backwater would even have the supplies for everyone; she reminded me that this place was meant to support entire trade fleets. Provisions were just about the only thing that the station had in abundance. 

It was tremendously boring. I had started going through the first few paragraphs of Remrion’s Ring, but given that I had an Emissarine dictionary open the whole time it was less like leisure and more like homework. I was so bored I almost wished I could go back to high school. Sitting around and waiting on that stupid space station almost made me reminisce about all the times I’d been fighting for my life with spectrademons and corporate thugs and everything else. The whole situation was so intensely boring, in fact, that when Quinn asked me if I wanted to go somewhere isolated and just talk, I didn’t even hesitate a second before saying “yes.”

SaffronDragon

So a lot of people, upon reading this chapter, have asked me about the state of AI in this universe, which I suppose is a good question. In short, there are two kinds: high-sapient AI and low-sapient AI. High-sapient AI are full individuals, generally taking the form of fully-mechanical species of synthetics like the Helpfuls and the Travelers. Low-sapient AI are things like Ariels and the helper drones on the Helium Glider. The metaphor I usually use for low-sapient AI is that it's like if you could train a dog to repair electrical equipment; they have thoughts and feelings, but all of the mental capacities outside of their highly specific function is unsophisticated enough that it's considered ethical to own them, so long as you treat them well. Helium, for what its worth, is a somewhat unique case that rides the line between the two categories. So now that that's settled, time to remind you all that you can click the link below to see my Patreon, where for only $3 a month you can read the next three chapters of the book, right now! I also have higher tiers that grant access to voting in patron polls and a collection of exclusive short stories. Otherwise, I'll see you in two weeks for Chapter 30: North Broadleaf High!