“They’re really real...” Delilah said. Or else her crewmates were insane, or tricking her, and neither seemed likely. “And… this business with a bridge generator?”

  “You can’t rule a galactic empire unless you can pop in and subjugate your subjects at will,” Winslow said. “For a long time, there was only one ship with a fully operational bridge generator: Kalea Machedo’s. Now there are two. This ship… it’s a hell of a first job, Delilah.”

  “Why did Ashok pick me?” Delilah said.

  “You’d have to ask him,” Winslow said.

  “I will, but it seems like a conversation better had in person.” Winslow stared at her without blinking, and Crowbar’s two eyes focused on her too. “What?” she said.

  “Ashok!” Winslow barked. “You mean you didn’t tell her about your situation?”

  The captain’s voice spoke over the PA. “About my – oh. Right. It didn’t come up. Do you think it’s important?”

  Winslow closed his eyes. “Delilah. Would you please accompany me to the captain’s quarters?”

  They didn’t go to the crew deck, where the cabins (small, but well appointed) were located. Instead, Winslow took her to the center of the ship, down a ladder into an engineering corridor, and then pressed on a piece of bulkhead indistinguishable from the rest.

  A section of the wall slid away, revealing a space smaller than her cabin, full of softly blinking lights and kilometers of bundled cable. “Engineer Delilah Mears, meet Captain Ashok Ranganathan.”

  Delilah understood immediately. “Our captain is an artificial intelligence?”

  Winslow nodded. “The original Ashok was the engineer on the White Raven, serving with Kalea Machedo. Several years ago, he was killed by an agent of the Axiom. But Ashok always had a habit of crawling into dangerous places without worrying overmuch about the danger – that’s how he lost an arm and both legs and a chunk of his face – so he’d prepared for the eventuality of sudden death. He designed and implanted a special recording device at the base of his spine. It might have paralyzed or killed him, but instead, it actually worked. The little black box created a template of his mind’s structure and a recording of his memories, or most of them, at least.”

  Delilah gazed at the blinking lights. She knew the breakthrough in creating stable artificial intelligences had hinged on using human brain scans as a basis for the new minds. Earlier versions of artificial intelligence had no more interest in humans than humans did in dust motes, and those alien intellects soon stopped communicating with their creators, vanishing into their own intellectual abstractions. If you built a nascent machine intelligence around the template of a human mind, with their thought patterns and personality and intelligence intact, the resulting AI retained an interest in human affairs, with the benefit of a vastly increased intellectual capacity.

  “But… making an AI is ruinously expensive and takes forever! There’s only one lab in the Jovian Imperative that even does that work, heavily subsidized by the government, and even the president of the Inner Planets Governing Council has been on a waiting list to get scanned for ten years!”

  “When you save the galaxy, you get to jump the line,” Winslow said. “Ashok has a powerful and wealthy friend at Almajara Corp. It helped that he’d recorded his own data – usually the scientists have to spend years hooking their subjects up to their systems, building up a working template over hundreds of sessions, but Ashok was recording himself constantly while he went about his life.”

  “But to have an AI as captain… Oh. The Trans-Neptunian Alliance.”

  “Right,” Winslow said. “AI have citizenship there. They can own property and enter into contracts and everything.”

  “I knew that, but I never thought much about it, because I thought there was only one AI citizen, President Shall. Back home a lot of people think he’s a figurehead, a publicity thing – just the TNA trying to look progressive and advanced.”

  “I have met Shall,” Winslow said. “He’s very much his own person. So is the captain. Ashok made a backup of himself before he started this mission, and stored it on Meditreme. If our ship doesn’t come back, that will boot up, and he’ll continue to live… which is an advantage he has over both of us. For now, though, The Golden Spider is Ashok’s body. He really should have told you. By all accounts he wasn’t very good at understanding people even when he was a person himself.” He put a hand on her arm. “Do you want to quit? We’re still within shuttle range of New Meditreme.”

  “No,” Delilah said. “If I leave now… I’ll feel like a coward. I left Earth because I wanted to see what else the galaxy has to offer. I didn’t expect anything like this, but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?” She glanced at the ceiling. “I did have one question, though… Is he watching us, right now?”

  Winslow shook his head. “There are no cameras in here. The captain said, ‘It would be like having a camera inside my brain.’ No cameras in your cabin or other private areas, either. You can talk to the captain over the ship’s comms, just like you can talk to me or Crowbar, but he’s not constantly listening. In the public areas, he can see and hear, but that’s no different from being on any ship with a captain who keeps an eye on the security monitors.”

  She relaxed a little. “Did you know, ah, the real Ashok?”

  Winslow winced. “He prefers ‘original’ to ‘real,’ though sometimes he says ‘meat-brain me,’ or at least he did until I begged him to stop. No, the Axiom lasered a hole through his brain before I met him, not long after he helped save the Vanir system. After the system was liberated, I started working in the Jovian Imperative, for Almajara Corp, doing research on biomechanical augmentations.” He gave a funny sort of smile. “That’s a specialty of mine. As a doctor, I’m honestly better at grafting on a new or artificial limb than I am at saving an old one, but the ship has a smart medical bay. Anyway. Part of bringing a new AI online is social interaction, and Ashok and I knew a few people in common, because I was friendly with some of the resistance people he met back on Vanir. Plus, we share an interest in augments and prosthetics. His doctors brought me in to help with his development, and we ended up becoming friends.”

  “So you don’t know if the new version is the same as the real – the original.”

  “Not personally, but I’ve talked to his friends, and I know the science. Artificial intelligences start out as near-copies of their templates, but then… things diverge. They’re the same minds running on new equipment, and that alone changes things. Once they start having new experiences, the gap widens. Our captain is not exactly Ashok as he was – his old friends tell me he has better impulse control now, and he thinks a lot faster, since he’s running on a quantum computer instead of a kilogram and a half of gray matter – but he has continuity of memory with his original self. I don’t know. I’m not the same person I was five years ago, either. Are you?”

  “Me five years ago could not have predicted that present-day me would be doing something like this,” she said.

  Three hours later, she joined Winslow in the curved observation deck near the nose of the ship. The walls were opaque when she entered, but gradually grew transparent, except for a bit of “floor” beneath her feet. There were distant stars, but mostly, all Delilah saw was darkness. “It’s so strange, being on a ship with steady gravity. I was floating or under thrust gravity on all the ships between Earth and here.”

  “Want me to turn it off?” Winslow said. “Floating in a room like this is a lot like being in open space, but with less chance of death.”

  Delilah shook her head. “I’m good. Microgravity makes me a little sick anyway.” That was an understatement. She still had anti-nausea pills in her cabin, but she hadn’t needed them today. “So what happens now?”

  “I’ve never been on a ship with its own bridge generator,” Winslow said. “Only through the big bridges.”

  “I’ve never even been through one of those,” Delilah said. “I saw the one in the Jovian Imperative, the line of ships waiting to go through, but I didn’t use it. This is the farthest I’ve been from home.” That bridge was an immense oval, marked by a perimeter of floating buoys that turned red or green depending on whether the bridge was active or not.

  “Are we ready to venture into the unknown?” Ashok said over the shipwide comms.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Winslow said.

  “Let there be hole,” Ashok said.

  At first, Delilah didn’t see anything, but then she perceived a thickening of the dark – a blot in space that started to spread. This bridgehead looked like a swirl of black ink in water, with irregular tendrils that stretched from an expanding center, reaching out to embrace the ship.

  “That’s different,” Winslow said.

  The darkness before them became larger than the ship, and the tendrils streamed by on all sides. Delilah had expected them to fly through a gate, but this was more like a jellyfish reaching out to capture and feed on prey… and they were the prey.

  The ship hummed and moved forward, and while Delilah was in the middle of a blink, they transitioned. The Golden Spider was suddenly in a cylindrical tunnel, the walls dark and metallic, with bands of light at irregular intervals, stretching as far as they could see. She’d heard the space between bridgeheads was dark, and impenetrable to sight or sensors; apparently the personal bridges were different. Were they in an actual place, or was this just her brain’s way of making sense of a space outside ordinary space-time?

  “It’s so weird. I just see darkness.” Ashok’s voice was wistful. “I had lots of extra lenses back when I was still meat-me, but the eyes underneath were original spec jelly-cameras, so I could see the tunnel, and the lights. They’re only visible to organic senses. Another Axiomatic mystery. Now, even with all my sensors, it’s like there’s nothing there at all. I’m playing myself an overlay based on one of my memories of traversing a bridge, just so I can see something, but it’s not the same.”

  After twenty-one seconds, they emerged into a new place, surrounded by tendrils that rapidly withdrew. There were more stars, and different ones, in Delilah’s field of view, but overall, the destination wasn’t radically different from the place they’d started. “I don’t see an alien space station,” she said.

  “Oh, we’re about a day’s journey away from the thing,” Ashok said. “It’s not a good idea to open a bridge in close proximity to an Axiom facility. Some of those stations react badly to unexpected visitors. The place we’re going seems inert, but Callie would never let me live it down if I lost the Golden Spider.”

  “Plus, if you lost the ship, your crew would die,” Winslow said.

  “Oh sure, also that. Goes without saying.”

  “You think so?” Winslow said. “I don’t mind hearing you say it.”

  “I’ll protect you all more diligently than I’d protect myself,” Ashok said. “After all, you don’t have backups. In the meantime, how about you get some rest, and when you have a minute, familiarize yourself with the data from the last visit to the object of entropic mystery.”

  “Did you send the info to our terminals?” Winslow said. “I didn’t get a notification.”

  “Where’s the fun in that? Nah, I knocked together an immersive experience. It’s almost as good as being there!”

  “But with less chance of death,” Delilah murmured.

  “Considerably less!” Ashok agreed.

  The ship had a fancy Hypnos suite, the kind with full-immersion sensory deprivation tanks to minimize outside interference. She’d never used such advanced simulation tech, not even on New Meditreme. Her understanding was that this experience was almost indistinguishable from real life – an idea that terrified the traditionalists back home. What if people chose to spend their lives in an imaginary world instead of the real one? On Earth there was legislation to slow down the introduction of such advanced simulation tech and curtail its use for public health reasons, but beyond the asteroid belt things were far less regulated.

  Delilah checked the connections on her diadem and then opened up the smooth black lozenge of the tank. She climbed inside, settling into the perfectly neutral conducting fluid. She took a breath, then slid the lid closed.

  A soothing chime let her know the simulation was about to begin, and then light appeared. Her perspective shifted, and she was no longer horizontal, but vertical, standing on a flat gray plain. Gradually, the environment around her coalesced until she was standing on the bridge of an unfamiliar ship, one with a dozen crew members working at assorted stations. A woman in a dark jumpsuit stood nearby with her arms crossed, gazing at an immense wraparound viewscreen. The screen was dominated by a black sphere inlaid with shining white lines in geometries that seemed to squirm and shift – unless Delilah focused on them, at which point they proved static and unchanging, but continued wriggling in her periphery. The woman had a cloud of curly dark hair, a prominent nose and an annoyed expression. She looked vaguely familiar.

  Ashok, or rather his avatar, stepped up beside Delilah, making her jump. “That’s Callie, my old captain, and head of the Axiom Extermination Task Force. The Scourge of the Exalted, the Benefactor’s Malefactor, She Who Runs Toward the Sound of Explosions.” He snorted. “It’s a good thing she’s just a recording right now, or she’d throw something at me for calling her all that.”

  Delilah walked around the woman, and yes, now that she had a name to put with the face, that’s who it was – the woman who’d reconstituted the Trans-Neptunian Alliance, a big enough event that they’d even paid some slight attention to it back on Earth. Delilah waved a hand in front of her face but Callie didn’t react. “So we’re ghosts here.”

  “Pretty much.” Ashok picked up a flat cap off a crew member and pulled it down on his head, and when Delilah glanced down, the hat was back on the crew member, but its double stayed on Ashok, too. “We can interact with objects in the simulation, but they’ll revert after a moment. They flicker back to baseline when we aren’t looking directly at them, to maintain the sense of realism.” He took off the crew member’s hat again and placed it on top of his first one at a jaunty angle. “Infinite hats. What a world.”

  Delilah looked at her hands, and they were hers, down to the tiny scar on the back of left one from a bot-welding mishap in college, a detail the Hypnos suite from their interview had overlooked. “This is amazingly realistic.”

  “It’s okay,” Ashok said. “It’s a pretty good scan of you – the ship made it when you came on board, and it’s way more high-def than the one you had on New Meditreme. We even caught that little twitch that happens sometimes in your left eyelid.” Delilah instinctively put a hand to her face, but Ashok didn’t seem to notice. He was gazing past her, at the viewscreen. “You should see what the Axiom could do with virtual reality, though. They had direct brain interfaces, which helps, but still. They used to have a virtual world so detailed you could count the grains of sand on the beach, and if you looked at them under a microscope, every one would be different.”

  “Used to?”

  “Oh, we had to blow up their computer. That faction of the Axiom was just hanging out in a simulation while they waited for their doomsday program to finish compiling. But I mean… I took some notes. It helped with my software work. Okay, things are about to kick off.” He sat down in an unattended crew seat, and Delilah took the one beside him.

  “Still nothing from the probes?” Callie said.

  A blonde woman standing at a terminal said, “Nothing. The object seems totally inert, except for the twisting lines, and as best we can tell, that’s an optical illusion.”

  “Hmm. We’re at double the minimum safe distance?” Callie said.

  “Even if that sphere turns out to have a black hole inside, we should be fine,” another crewperson said. “Of course, if it’s some kind of previously unknown system-destroying bomb, that’s a different story.”

  “At least we’re way the hell away from anything else at all,” Callie said. “As a rule, the Axiom were keen on destroying everybody else, not themselves, anyhow. Ready the missiles.”

  “Missiles ready.”

  “Launch,” Callie said.

  After a moment, six objects appeared on the viewscreen, lit up an unnatural green to make them stand out, and hurtled toward the sphere. Their view of the object must have been highly magnified, or more likely relayed through probes situated closer in space.

  “Ten seconds to impact,” a crewperson said. “Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.” The objects were so small now they were just green dots, and Delilah realized the sphere must be nearly the size of a small moon. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Impact.”

  The missiles exploded, the light from the detonation expanding from pinpoints to overlapping flashes that entirely obscured their view of the object –

  – and then the flashes shrank again, the edges of the light pulling inward, returning to pinpoints, and then to nothingness, and then to the green dots of the missiles, now unmoving, floating against the face of the object.

  “What?” Callie and Delilah said simultaneously. “Why did the feed run in reverse?” Callie demanded. That was exactly what it looked like: a recording of an explosion, running backward, showing the bombs un-exploding.

  “It didn’t!” someone said. “We – this is the real-time view!”

  “Are we still getting data from the missiles?”

  “We are!” the blonde said. “According to the data, they detonated, but then their systems came back online, and now they’re throwing errors, because even the missiles know that doesn’t make any sense. Should I… detonate them again?”

  “Why not?” Callie said.

  This time, the explosions didn’t go as far before reversing: a mere blip of light, a slight flash, and then back to baseline green.

  “Fuck,” Callie said. “Is it… are they fucking with time? Are the Axiom messing with time now?”