“Sometimes I think those pure machine minds had the right idea,” I said. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “No, but you need company, for your mental health and wellness. Believe me,” Elena said, “That’s my department.”

  “None of you can go,” I said. “You have too much work to do. Besides, it’s too risky to take anyone. This might be a one-way trip.”

  “So take someone who likes risk,” Elena said.

  “Alas, Ashok is also an AI, and there’s not enough room in the data banks of a ship for both of us.”

  “Maybe that new engineer of his, Mears?” Drake said. “Ashok told me he saw something of himself in her, which I assume means she’ll cheerfully stick her head inside an alien artifact just to see what it looks like.”

  “I didn’t vote ‘yes’ yet anyway,” Janice said. “Who says you’re taking anybody?”

  “True,” I said. “We can table the question of a companion until we know whether I’m even going. All in favor?”

  Drake and Elena voted aye right away. Janice made us wait while she “weighed the cons, and the other cons,” but in the end she voted yes, I think because she knew we’d call in Windowpane if she didn’t anyway.

  “Uzoma?” I said.

  “I will vote yes, on the condition that I accompany you on the journey,” Uzoma said.

  “What? You can’t go, you’re the minister of–”

  “I resign,” Uzoma said.

  “Don’t resign!” I said. “You’re great at your job, and we just got you into it a year ago!”

  “My undersecretary is competent,” Uzoma said. “Solvent is one of the Free, too, and having another alien on your cabinet will be good for you politically. The Free make up seventeen percent of the population of New Meditreme, and that percentage is growing.”

  “Why do you even want to go?”

  “I grew up on Earth,” Uzoma said. “I spent my adult life in universities, then in cryo-sleep for centuries, and, apart from a brief interval of terror on an alien shipbuilding facility, I have spent my subsequent consciousness also in universities, or in other scientific and research settings. The reason I joined the mission with Elena on the Anjou all those years ago was because I wished to see alien worlds. We were supposed to be colonists on a distant planet. That life never came to pass for me. I keenly feel my lack of travel and experience. This seems an opportunity to rectify that deficit, while also serving an important function on the mission.”

  I could hardly argue with that. Uzoma usually doesn’t come to a decision without considering it thoroughly, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Elena said. “For one thing, Uzoma is an expert on machine intelligence, and they might have some, ah, perspective on matters that could be more difficult for you to approach objectively.”

  That annoyed me, but was probably also true.

  “Solvent could just be acting minister, while Uzoma is officially off-station working on a project,” Elena went on. “When you come back safe, like I know you will, Uzoma can take back their position. How does that find?”

  “That is acceptable,” Uzoma said. “President Shall?”

  “Taking a companion makes this all more dangerous. If the new version of me didn’t ever come back, it would be too bad, but it wouldn’t be a disaster. If Uzoma doesn’t come back…”

  “You know where the message came from,” Elena said. “If you don’t come back, Callie can open a wormhole there and go looking for you. Or Ashok, since he has his own bridge generator now. Or both.”

  “You know where the message said it came from,” Janice said. “Why should we believe Shall’s evil twin about anything?”

  “There’s no evidence that he’s evil,” Drake said.

  “Just saying,” Janice said.

  “I accept that this journey has risks,” Uzoma said. “My original mission to colonize another planet was expected to fail – that is why Earth sent so many ships, in the hope that some small number of them might succeed. Similarly, I believe the opportunity for this experience outweighs the risks.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I admit, it will be nice to have some company, and it’s not like the message said ‘come alone.’”

  “I will make my preparations.” Uzoma blinked out of the simulation.

  “Did you have a ship in mind?” Drake said. The polity’s nonmilitary vessels were under his aegis.

  “Maybe the Briarpatch?” I said. “It’s got sufficient computational power and storage to hold me, decent weapons, a recently refurbished Tanzer drive, and since it just passed inspections this morning, all the repair drones are still on board – we can leave them to be my spare bodies.”

  “Works for me,” Drake said. “Did you want your war drone taken out of storage and loaded on board?”

  “Oh, no, I can’t imagine that would be necessary,” I said.

  [I’m writing this document as I go, with a part of my mind tasked to act as recording angel, but I can come back from a future date to insert additional notes, and this is one of them: that last thing I just said was really stupid.]

  [I know, if I’m writing about events as they happen, why is this in past tense, and not present? Because I am in fact recording things whole microseconds after they occur, and accuracy is important to me.]

  Drake and Janice said their farewells, and I was left alone with Elena and her lava-flow hair. She was my closest friend on the cabinet. Really my closest friend period, apart from Callie, and this relationship is a lot less fraught with history.

  “How different do you think this other you is going to be from you-you?” Elena said. “We’re joking about you going insane on a voyage without anyone to keep you company, but this other you… he’s been alone for years.”

  “I have no idea,” I said. I had suspicions, though.

  Elena leaned over and kissed my faceplate. “Be safe out there.”

  “The one going out there won’t exactly be this me, either. I’ll still be safe on New Meditreme.”

  “So tell him, then.”

  “He’ll remember,” I said.

  I did some complicated stuff involving math and encryption and compression and loaded a copy of myself onto the Briarpatch.

  And… that new consciousness is now taking over this narrative. Hi there. I remember writing everything that came before this, but I know, intellectually, I’m a new version of myself, so I might as well mark that fact here.

  Why am I writing this at all? Because of the Presidential Records Act. “The executive will, to the greatest reasonable extent possible, excluding undue hardship, keep contemporaneous notes of official business and matters of state, to provide a record for future citizens of the Trans-Neptunian Alliance, said notes subject to permanent security classification or delayed release, to be determined on a case-by-case basis.” As an artificial intelligence, I can task a part of my mind to record pretty much all my thoughts and actions on a given topic without undue hardship, so here we are. It would be easier for me to archive a compressed file of my entire sensorium, but that wouldn’t be accessible to the average Trans-Neptunian, so I strive to record my experiences in accessible language instead, and even to make the account narratively engaging if possible, because nobody wants to be a bore. Happy reading, future citizen.

  Let me give you a glimpse into my inner world: I was pretty excited to get out into space again. I wasn’t always president. I used to have adventures. Here, let me copy and paste the little Presidential biography that schoolkids on New Meditreme read about me:

  President Shall is the first AI (artificial intelligence) head of state. Shall is a machine intelligence based on the human mind of a man named Michael Garcia-Hassan, former husband of Captain Kalea Machedo. Michael commissioned the AI version of himself to serve as a companion for his wife while she was away from home on missions, so she wouldn’t get lonely in space. Over time, the AI had a lot of exciting adventures with Captain Machedo, and eventually became pretty different from the person he was based on – so different he took on a new name, Shall. He helped Captain Machedo eliminate the ancient aliens known as the Axiom, saving the Taliesen system from destruction and liberating the people of the Vanir system. Shall is a real actual hero!

  Back then, artificial intelligences didn’t have many rights. Even if they helped save the galaxy, they were still considered property, just like a toaster oven or a shoe! But Captain Machedo knew Shall was a person just like you and me, even if he doesn’t have a body like we do. When she helped found the new Trans-Neptunian Alliance, Captain Machedo made sure one of the first laws granted people like Shall full citizenship.

  After that, Shall was appointed acting president, and in the first TNA elections a year later, he was officially elected to that position by the citizens, because he’d done such a good job helping to build New Meditreme. If he keeps up the good work, maybe we’ll let him stay on – pretty soon, you’ll get to help decide with a vote of your own!

  Elena wrote that. I told her I thought it was a bit much, especially the hero stuff, and she told me that was too bad: she was in charge of the educational system, and she approved it. So there you go. How others see us, I guess.

  I hadn’t done much hero-ing lately, though. I’d spent years doing the good and important work of rebuilding the tattered remains of the Trans-Neptunian Alliance into something resembling its former glory, and that work was diverting and challenging, even for a giant robot brain like mine. But it wasn’t adventure, and I was frankly jealous of Callie and Ashok venturing out into the unknown to learn new things and blow up old ones while I was left behind to be a head of state. (I know, it’s a good class of problem.) I was finally going back out!

  I ran through a systems check on the Briarpatch, and also stretched my metaphorical limbs. I felt rather constrained, after having New Meditreme station as my body for so long, but the new ship was more capacious than the White Raven, so I tried to adjust my standards accordingly. It was strange having a small gym instead of a whole health complex, a four-person Hypnos suite instead of an entire deck of rest and recreation options, a little hydroponic garden instead of a parks district, ten crew cabins instead of blocks upon blocks of apartments. The Briarpatch was big enough to have something more like a cafeteria than a galley, though I still missed the bustle of my restaurants. I’d grown used to being a city, it seems.

  Still, the Briarpatch was more ship than I needed for a journey with one companion; it was just the best available balance of size and computational power. The vessel, designed for research missions, was big enough for a crew of ten, and the upper decks had had an armory (really just an overgrown weapons locker), the aforementioned cafeteria with attached garden, an administrative office, a full medical bay, dedicated comms and navigation stations (in different parts of the ship, rather a change from the White Raven, where Janice did both those jobs from the cockpit), crew quarters, and storage. Down below were the nuts-and-bolts: the Tanzer Drive, electrical systems, life support, and all the other infrastructure, plus a cargo bay that included a little runabout shuttle and some probes.

  Once Uzoma was on board, I said farewell to the bigger version of me on the station, undocked, wove through the traffic buzzing around New Meditreme like bees around a hive (not like flies on a piece of rotten meat, as Callie likes to say), and set a course for our destination, farther from the sun, out among the icy planitesimals.

  “I will rattle around in here like the last nut in the can.” Uzoma didn’t take the captain’s quarters, but settled into the executive officer’s cabin instead, stowing their minimal gear with an efficiency I admired. “We don’t need more of a crew to run the ship?”

  “The dirty secret is that most ship functions are automated these days, even without giant machine brains like mine running things. People are really just on board to do whatever tasks need doing at either end of the trip, and for improvising solutions to the assorted disasters that come up en-route, but I can do the latter.”

  “I suppose I will have to do the cooking.”

  “If you want nutritional yeast mush, I’ve got you covered.”

  “That may be sufficient. I gather this will not be a journey of great duration?” Uzoma strolled through the ship, walking along smooth floors and past gleaming walls, and I felt a little flush of pride. The Briarpatch had been something of a junker when we bought it at a Jovian Imperative surplus sale, and our shipwrights had made it better than new. The Free didn’t have a singular culture – they had, in fact, thousands of totally distinct micro-cultures – but a whole lot of them liked to tinker and repair things, and we had some of the best tinkerers in the system on New Meditreme. The artificial gravity was nice, too. That was the invention that made the TNA’s fortune – created by the Axiom, but reproduced by my old friend Ashok.

  “It will take about a day to reach the point where the bridge is supposed to open,” I said. “We should arrive just in time for our appointment. Once we traverse the bridge, I don’t know what awaits us.”

  “Your… counterpart did not give you very much notice.”

  “I gather it’s a situation of some urgency.”

  “You truly do not know more than you told us at the meeting?” Uzoma said.

  Uzoma was almost as good at collating data as I was, despite only having a meat brain to run all that processing on. “I shared those things I knew for sure that I thought were relevant. But… I have some details, some suppositions, some suspicions, and some extrapolations.”

  “Consider your caveats duly noted.” Uzoma sat down cross-legged in the middle of a corridor, which struck me as bizarre, but then I realized: there was no one else on board, so they wouldn’t be obstructing anyone’s passage, and they’d rightly decided they could sit wherever and whenever the urge struck them. “Please share.”

  “It’s clear to me that my budded-off consciousness has diverged a lot from me by now. For one thing, he’s taken on a new name.” That fact, at least, will simplify this narrative going forward, even if it complicates everything else. Names are interesting things. I started out as Michael, and after the divorce I became Shall (originally as in, “he who shall not be named,” but nicknames eventually develop their own autonomous sort of integrity, and I wanted to be considered separate from that man anyway, after his infidelities). “The other me wants to be called Will.”

  “Shall, and Will,” Uzoma said. “An interesting choice. What do you think it signifies?”

  “Maybe ‘Will’ as in – do what thou will? The will to win? Where there’s a will there’s a way? Lord willing and the creek don’t rise? I don’t know what he’s thinking.”

  “There is an old linguistics joke about the word ‘shall,’” Uzoma said. “Do you know it?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “In our modern parlance, ‘shall’ just sounds like a formal or old-fashioned version of ‘will.’ But long ago, in British English, a clear and firm distinction was drawn between the uses of two words.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That much I know: ‘shall’ was used to talk about something that would definitely happen in the future, or as a command, and ‘will’ was used to express intention and desire. I just don’t know the joke.”

  “An American goes swimming in the Thames,” Uzoma said. “The current is strong, and he is pulled under. He struggles to get his head above water and cries out, ‘I will drown, and no one shall save me!’ A group of grammarians watching from the river bank turn to one another and shrug. ‘Well, if that’s what he wants, who are we to interfere?’”

  “Did people actually laugh at that joke?”

  “I suspect it was primarily used as an illustration in language classes,” Uzoma conceded. “But I do wonder if it might be relevant to Will’s choice of a name. Perhaps it indicates a desire to proceed more forcefully and with more individual volition?”

  “Huh,” I said. “I was pretty much in a support role back when we split, helping to run the White Raven, but not driving decisions the way I am now. You might be right.”

  I considered telling Uzoma something else I knew, but decided it wasn’t relevant. [Here’s another of those notes from future me: stupid statement, past me.] It’s also a bit embarrassing, especially as a confession to someone as emotionally regulated as Uzoma tends to be.

  I’ve known for a long time that Will had a secret – I just thought he died with it, and instead, he’s been living with it. When the drone reconnected with my network, it requested confidentiality for a little snippet of its experience, just a few seconds in the chaos of saving Callie from the collapse of the alien space station. I complied, encrypting that part of my memory so thoroughly I could never read it without a random key generated by the drone, which promptly died (or so I thought). Callie even asked me about it–”Did you, ah, synch up with the drone’s memories?” I told her about the confidentiality request, and let her know: “Whatever you said to the drone, thinking it would go with me to my robot grave, is still secret.” She joked that all I missed was “just a lot of really filthy sexy dirty talk.”

  My assumption all this time has been that the redacted information was my deathbed confession, my dying declaration of love eternal, probably an incredibly embarrassing and overemotional outpouring, but maybe it was something else. Maybe it was something crucial, or maybe it was trivial. I can’t access the data, and I can’t ask Callie because she’s unreachable and I didn’t have time to wait for her return. What passed between Will and Callie in those few seconds?

  Oh well. I guess I can always ask Will when I get wherever I’m going.

  In the course of Uzoma’s wandering through – no, that’s not intentional enough, call it a survey of – the ship, they ended up in the cargo bay, opened a locker, gasped, and leapt backward.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Uzoma glanced up at the corner where the nearest cargo bay camera was. “You didn’t tell me you’d brought the Mayor. I briefly thought someone had stuffed a corpse into this locker.”