Fassin had nothing to do but float in his own extemporised acceleration cradle in the seat next to Y’sul’s. He wouldn’t be allowed to stay there as they approached the wormhole portal; Quercer Janath had found a tight little cabin a few bulkheads back from the command space where he could wait that particular experience out. In the meantime, after some complaints, they allowed him to interface with the Protreptic’s computer, though they insisted on this being at several removes from the ship’s core systems, and on him being accompanied by some sort of sub-personality of their own. The visits would be conducted in a factor two or three of slowdown, which seemed to suit everybody concerned. At least, Fassin thought, the journey would seem to go quicker.
The virtual environment where Fassin was allowed to meet the ship took the form of a huge, half-ruined temple by a wide, slow-moving river on the edge of a great, quiet, silent city under a small, high, unmoving sun of an intense blue-white.
Fassin represented as his human self, dressed in house casuals, the ship as a skinny old man in a loincloth and the AI subroutine as some sort of ginger-haired ape with long, loose-looking limbs, an ancient, too-big helmet wobbling on its head, a dented breastplate with one broken strap slanting across its bulbous chest and a short kilt of segmented leather hanging from its skinny hips. A short, rusty sword dangled from its side.
The first time Fassin had visited the ship’s personality, the ape had led him by the hand from a doorway down the steps towards the river where the old man sat, looking out at the sluggish brown waters.
On the far side of the broad, oily stream was a desert of brightly glittering broken glass, stretching in low, billowed hills as far as the eye could see, like all the shattered glass the universe had ever known all gathered in the one vast place.
“Of course I’m dead,” the ship explained. The old man had very dark green skin and a voice made up of sighs and wheezes. His face was nearly immobile, just an aged mask, grizzled with patchy white whiskers. “The ship self-destructed.”
“But if you’re dead,” Fassin said, “how are you talking to me?”
The old man shrugged. “To be dead is to be no longer part of the living world. It is to be a shade, a ghost. It doesn’t mean you can’t talk. Talk is almost all you can do.”
Fassin thought the better of trying to persuade the old man that he was still alive. “What do you think I am?” he asked.
The old man looked at him. “A human? Male? A man.”
Fassin nodded. “Do you have a name?” he asked the old man.
A shake of the head. “Not any more. I was the Protreptic but that ship is gone now and I am dead, so I have no name.”
Fassin left a polite gap for the old man to ask him what his name was, but the inquiry didn’t come.
The ape sat a couple of metres away and two steps further up towards the creeper-festooned temple. It was sitting back, taking its weight on its long arms spread out behind it and picking one ear with a long, delicate-looking foot, inspecting the results with great concentration.
“When you were alive,” Fassin said, “were you truly alive? Were you sentient?”
The old man rocked backwards, laughed briefly. “Bless you, no. I was just software in a computer, just photons inside a nanofoam substrate. That’s not alive, not in the conventional sense.”
“What about the unconventional sense?”
Another shrug. “That does not matter. Only the conventional sense matters.”
“Tell me about yourself, about your life.”
A blank-faced stare. “I don’t have a life. I’m dead.”
“Then tell me about the life you had.”
“I was a needle ship called the Protreptic of the Voehn Third Spine Cessorian Lustral Squadron, built in the fifth tenth of the third year of Haralaud, in the Vertebraean Axis, Khubohl III, Bunsser Minor. I was an extensible fifteen-metre-minimum craft, rated ninety-eight per cent by the Standard Portal Compatibility Quotient Measure, normal unstowed operating diameter—”
“I didn’t really mean all the technical stuff,” Fassin said gently.
“Oh,” said the old man, and disappeared, just like a hologram being switched off.
Fassin looked at the ape, which was holding something up to the light. It looked down at him, blinking. “What?” it said.
“He disappeared,” Fassin told it. “It disappeared. The old man; the ship.”
“Prone to do that,” the ape said, sighing.
The next time, the landscape on the far side of the wide, slack-watered river from the temple steps was a jungle; a great green, yellow and purple wall of strange carbuncular stalks, drooping leaves and coiled vines, its bowed, pendulous creepers and branches drooping down to drag in the slow swell of the current.
Everything else was as before, though perhaps the old man was less skinny, his face a fraction more mobile and his voice less tired.
“I was an AI hunter. For six and a half thousand years I helped seek out and destroy the anathematics. If I could have felt such an emotion, I would have been very proud.”
“Did it never seem strange to you to be hunting down and killing machines that were similar to yourself?”
The ginger-haired ape — sitting in its usual place a few steps up, trying to clean its stained, dented armour by spitting on it and then polishing it with a filthy rag — coughed at this point, though when Fassin glanced up at the animal it returned his gaze blankly.
“But I was just a computer,” the old man said, frowning. “Less than that, even; a ghost within it. I did what I was told, always obedient. I was the interface between the Voehn who did the thinking and made the decisions, and the physical structures and systems of the ship. An intermediary. No more.”
“Do you miss that?”
“In a way. I cannot, really. To miss something, truly, would be — as I understand it — to experience an emotion, and obviously that is impossible for something which is not sentient, let alone not alive as well. But to the extent that I can judge that one state of affairs is somehow more preferable to another, perhaps because one allows me to fulfil the role I was assigned and one does not, I could say that I miss the ship. It’s gone. I’ve looked for it, but it isn’t there. I cannot feel it or control it, therefore I know that it must have self-destructed. I must be running on another substrate somewhere.”
Fassin looked up at the ape-thing sitting a few steps away. Quercer Janath had taken over full control of the Protreptic, cutting off the ship’s own computer and the software running within it from the vessel’s subsystems.
“What do you think I am, then?” Fassin asked. “What do you think the little ape in his armour sitting behind us is?”
“I don’t know,” the old man confessed. “Are you other dead ships?”
Fassin shook his head. “No.”
“Then perhaps you are representations of those in charge of the substrate I am now running on. You may want to quiz me on my actions while I was the ship.”
“You know, you seem alive to me,” Fassin said. “Are you sure you might not be alive and sentient now, now that you’re not connected to the ship?”
“Of course not!” the old man said scornfully. “I am able to give the appearance of life without being alive. It is not especially difficult.”
“How do you do this?”
“By being able to access my memories, by having trillions of facts and works and books and recordings and sentences and words and definitions at my disposal.” The old man looked at the ends of his fingers. “I am the sum of all my memories, plus the application of certain rules from a substantial command-set. I am blessed with the ability to think extremely quickly, so I am able to listen to what you, as a conscious, sentient being, are saying and then respond in a way that makes sense to you, answering your questions, following your meaning, anticipating your thoughts.