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35




“Daisy . . .” Traci was hesitant. She unconsciously looked to the overhead speakers, a habit they’d developed long ago when addressing the AI. “This was your idea?”

“That is correct. I have learned a great deal about the nature of human consciousness and believed it was necessary based on Jack’s increasingly erratic metabolic activity. The injected nanofilaments quickly found their way to the active regions of his cerebral cortex.”

“Active regions of his brain?” She wiped at the tears welling in her eyes. “Yes, I suppose that couldn’t have taken very long. They wouldn’t have had much to choose from.”

“Funny as ever,” cybernetic Jack said. “Daisy, please go on.”

“Thank you. The nanofilaments act as passive relays. In essence, they are antenna for a wireless interface, and less invasive than a neurolink implant.”

“I’m familiar with the process,” she said impatiently, remembering the unpleasant sensation herself. “They use the oxygenated blood to create pathways into whatever regions have the most latent neural activity. I had to be injected with them, too, remember?”

“Of course. I am incapable of forgetting.”

“See?” he said. “Proof that Daisy is, in fact, fully female.”

“Very funny. But the risk of physical dependency increases dramatically over time. What did you do to mitigate that?”

“There was nothing I could do,” Daisy said. “It was a necessary risk to preserve Jack’s mental state.”

“His mental state?”

“Daisy noticed a lot of irregularities the longer I was under,” he reminded her. “Remember how all the docs expected delta waves to be dominant under stasis?”

“Like a patient under anesthesia,” Traci said. “First time going under I started dreaming after a while—no idea how long—but I remember they were vivid. I was surprised when Noelle woke me up.” She left the implication hanging: that she woke up to find them nearing Earth only to learn that Jack was headed into the unknown.

“Right. Those are theta waves starting to assert themselves. Turns out if it goes on long enough the rest of your brain decides it doesn’t want to stay dormant, so my alpha and beta waves started amping up. My mind was craving sensory inputs while my body was being forced to sleep. That’s when Daisy decided she needed to do something before I turned schizo.”

“Jack’s formulation is essentially correct,” Daisy said. “There appears to be an upper limit to the time a human mind can safely remain suppressed. In his case, I began to notice troubling patterns after three hundred and seventy-two days that resembled the chemical traits of schizophrenia. By four hundred and twelve days I determined he needed to be conscious to prevent any long-term effects. Yet it would be equally dangerous for him to leave hibernation.”

She instinctively grasped their dilemma. It was a terrifying notion, not unlike the tales of patients in surgery who became fully aware of the trauma being inflicted upon them. “You didn’t have enough food aboard to bring him out, whereas you had plenty of IV nutrients. You let his mind awaken while leaving his body in torpor.”

“In a sense, though it is perhaps more accurately thought of as a lucid-dream state. His mind only needed an outlet, which I provided. By tracing the nanoparticles, it was possible to create an overlay of his neural pathways in my network. This enables him to use me like a computer’s boot-up routine.”

“A symbiotic relationship?”

“It is more properly parasitic,” Daisy said, “though I understand that is a distasteful analogy. It has required me to sacrifice a significant amount of my free memory space.”

“You’ve been okay with this, Jack?”

“Beats going crazy. We’re pretty sure we can unwind it when the time comes.”

Pretty sure. He’d better hope so, otherwise he’d be plugged into Daisy for the rest of his life. She decided to move onto more practical concerns. “Is this also how you’ve been controlling the ship?”

“Absolutely. I can see everything I need through the onboard cameras, I hear and speak through the intercom, and I can access all of the ship’s systems in real time through Daisy’s interface.”

A shudder coursed through her as she realized he could be watching his own body from outside of it, like a near-death experience. She realized he wasn’t just alert and using Daisy to communicate: Magellan had become an extension of him, and his mind had become inexorably intertwined with her neural network. Could he in fact extricate himself from that? “This is how you’ve been communicating with us, how you maneuvered through approach and docking . . . is this how you explored the wormhole?”

“Direct brain-computer interface,” Jack said, “same way I’ve been talking to you guys and sending data this whole time. And yes, it’s awfully weird.”

“I can imagine,” she said with a shaky voice. “Awake, but not really.”

“You get used to it, but I meant the wormhole. There’s a lot we have to talk about.”

There certainly is. She’d come prepared to bring her friend home, and maybe more. Her mind had been a cauldron of conflicting emotions she was finally prepared to confront and lay bare, to hell with any consequences. Yet now she was talking to another machine? No, not quite. Jack’s body lay before her as a withering husk while his mind seemed sharp as ever. If anything, he might have become more empathetic after Daisy turned herself into his boot drive.

That the AI had taken such initiative was just as startling. Had she become lonely out here as well? There were too many unsettling questions.

This was nothing like she’d expected, yet here she was talking to him. And it was obviously him, not just some clever chatbot. The voice carried his inflections, his speech patterns, but with uncanny synthetic overtones that only highlighted their physical separation. She wiped again at the globules of moisture gathering in her eyes. Her voice was hoarse as she reached into her pocket. “I brought you a snack,” she said feebly. “Guess you won’t mind if I take it.”


Traci stood with her feet in a pair of stirrups beside the hibernation pod. She absentmindedly chewed on a bit of salami, indulging the fleeting comfort of food as she stared at Jack’s dormant form. It was a technological miracle that Daisy had been able to take the action she had, and had managed to preserve him for so long. In saving his mind, Daisy had demonstrated just how far hers had developed.

“Smells good.”

She stopped in mid-bite. “You can smell this?”

“Sort of. Daisy figured out an olfactory interface using the ship’s chemical sniffers. It doesn’t register quite the same way but I can pick out substances that weren’t there before.”

She held up the half-empty bag. “Sure you’re not cheating by looking at me?”

“Daisy blocked the med bay’s camera feed at my insistence. This is enough of an out-of-body experience without being able to look at myself.”

Traci knew she’d feel the same. She silently nodded her understanding, then remembered he couldn’t see her either. “Can’t blame you. How have you kept yourself occupied all this time?”

His laugh was coarsely mechanical, an off-putting effect of his synthetic voice. “There’s been a lot to digest. Then figuring out where we were—that took more time than you might imagine.”

“Not at all, actually. It would’ve taken Bob a lot longer to figure it out if you hadn’t warned us. All he had to do was recalibrate the star trackers and pulsar database.”

“You named your AI Bob?”

“It beat what the programmers called him. Even he thought it felt stupid. He prefers the simplicity, said it’s easier to isolate in conversation.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” He paused, causing her to wonder if his mind now processed information as quickly as an AI. “There’s more,” he finally said, “but I’d rather tell you when I’m revived—when I’m me again.”

She wiped at the persistent tears welling in her eyes again, glad that he couldn’t see her now. “Me too,” she sniffed. “I mean yes, there’s a lot more.” Her mind raced through everything she’d spent the last two years rehearsing and could only settle on the simple, direct route. “I really missed you.”

“I missed you too. I’m sorry things worked out the way they did, but I’m glad you’re okay. That was one of the first things I asked when Daisy woke me up.”

She blushed. “You also sounded like you didn’t want me to come. Of course there was no way I could ignore that.”

Another electronic laugh. She began to wonder if its rough tenor was a result of not being used much until now, and silently resolved to work with him on that. “Reverse psychology. I knew you were too hardheaded to resist.”

“You also know better than to try a load of crap like that on me.” She rested a hand on the pod’s plexiglass shield as she studied him, anticipating the moment when his mind would reunite with his body. “You’re worried that you can’t go back.”

“Yes, if I’m being honest. Which I am. I don’t know if it’s possible and neither does Daisy. I’ve been plugged into her network for so long that I may have become dependent on it. We’re in uncharted territory.”

She rolled her eyes. “In just about every way possible.” She was intimately familiar with the med bay’s limited resources. All deep-space crews were trained in emergency medical care, but it was always better to have an actual MD aboard. She wished Noelle was here. “Ultimately you can’t know until you try. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I could die, for starters.”


“I do not believe that bringing Jack out of hibernation would be advisable,” Daisy said, “not without proper medical attention on Earth.” Her disarmingly pleasant monotone could not take the sting from the news. “His mind has become dependent on my neural network. While this should eventually be reversable, it’s not safe with the level of medical care we have available.”

“How can you be sure of that?” Traci challenged her. “The human mind is incredibly resilient.” She said it with more certainty than she felt.

“There’s more to it than that,” Jack said. “Believe me, there’s nothing more I’d like better than to be whole again. But we’d have one shot at it, with no way to reverse course if it didn’t work. There’s the little problem with nanofilaments.”

“They have become deeply ingrained,” Daisy explained. “The neural lace they created has extended beyond his cognitive functions. His body is becoming dependent on their interface with my network.”

“Like a coma patient becoming dependent on life support,” he said. “You can’t unwind that easily, not without a team of docs attending to the process.”

“The safest course of action is for us to return to Earth together,” Daisy said. “Though that is not without its own challenges.”

Traci crossed her arms, rocking back and forth on her heels. “That’s another two years with you in this pod. And Magellan’s not in a condition to make that trip. We’d have to undock the hab, mate it to Columbus. Then we’d have to get you down to the surface and straight to a hospital.”

“All while keeping me plugged into Daisy’s network,” he reminded her. “That’s a lot of mass to deorbit and drop into an ICU.”

“Jack’s cognitive functions can be partitioned within the hab module’s network, though they would become limited. It is his brain doing most of the work, I have merely been giving it an outlet.”

That drew a muffled snort from her. “You’re saying his brain doesn’t take up that much space?”

“No, but it has displaced many of my sensory inputs,” Daisy continued. “The amount of processing potential contained in the human brain, when compared to that required for my processors, makes for a useful comparison. Consider the size and complexity required for my neural network just to emulate human intelligence. My advantage is purely mechanical.”

“And yet you continually outsmart us,” she said.

“I do not see it that way. I have the advantage of processing speed and memory, but you have an adaptability that I may never achieve. The human brain is a marvel of design.”

“There she goes again,” he said. “She sounds more like you every day.”

She perked up at the memory of their spirited conversations on the nature of creation, Jack’s staunchly secular worldview clashing with her unwavering belief in a higher power. “It sounds like Daisy’s opened up your mind more than I thought.”

“I do find myself thinking more clearly,” he admitted. “It’s like my brain’s adapted to its new home.”

“We have had opportunities to revisit some of your discussions from your mission together,” Daisy said. “There is a certain logic to it, though it would seem impossible to test such a thesis.”

“That’s where the ‘faith’ part comes in,” Traci said, unsure if she was ready to jump into this topic so soon.

“You believe humans are the first intelligent beings, a favored creation. You believe that you have been given the responsibility to expand life, ultimately beyond your home planet.”

“In so many words, yes. To go forth and multiply.”

There was a silent burst of activity on his biomonitors and her interface, as if Jack and Daisy were conferring between themselves.

He spoke after a long pause. “Then maybe it’s time we told you about the Artifact.”


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