Conversations on the Utopian Ideal: Twenty Three

People say starship pilots become their ships, when they're plugged in to the pod.

It's as true as any simple explanation of a vastly complex process affected by a thousand thousand variables can be, which is to say, not very.

Apart, the ship and the pilot exist, separate entities. When the intricacies of Jovian technology join them in a union more intimate than any imagined in the world of the flesh, one does not become the other.

The pilot is not the ship any more than the ship is the pilot.

But it is true enough that when the neural links slide home into the pod-jacks and the connection goes live a pilot is no longer themselves entirely, either, not the same self that walks on two feet through the corridors of the station, that sees only what can be revealed by limited human eyesight, the self contained entirely by a frame of flesh and bone.

A pilot in pod gains and loses with each transit of the barrier between metal and mind. Loses and gains with each journey back.

Capsuleers differ in the way they negotiate the constant demand of their profession to cross again and again from the self of the flesh to the self of the stars. Some reject the idea of unity between themselves and their ship as much as they can, and talk instead of controlling their ship as if pod technology is only a more efficient version of the Captain's bridge chair. Some regard their ships as if they were bodies to be put on and taken off, as casually as anyone with access to cloning technology puts on and takes off the body of their birth, declaring that their self is contained entirely in their intellect, whatever physical architecture it may be hooked up to at any given moment.

Both may be right. Or neither.

Cloning teaches us that the mind must be separate from the brain, that the self must be separate from the body it inhabits. If that is true, then the capsuleer makes the ship they wear themselves as thoroughly as anyone wearing a vat-grown body has made that biomass lattice their own even before the slow colonisation of their DNA.

But not everyone believes it is true. Some hold that something essential is lost with that first transliteration of memory and personality from flesh to flesh. Other say they believe no such thing, but hoard and protect their first body behind steel walls and security screens sufficient to keep even CONCORD out. The mind is the self, true, but the mind is the product of the brain, with all its intertwined and ceaselessly firing neurons responding to every twitch and tingle of the body that houses and shapes and changes it daily.

Except for capsuleers, who regularly, even eagerly, switch off the sensations of their flesh and switch on the carefully calibrated information flow from the thousand systems of their ship.

A pilot in pod does not become their ship, but perhaps in the intangible alchemy that technology provides, pilot and ship together become, temporarily, a single self, a mind created by the biological reactions of a human brain to mechanical stimuli fed directly into the cortex.

As complex as the technology of the pod is, the human mind is more complex still. For many pilots, their sense of control or habitation, of ownership or union, varies widely between one ship and the next. Different makes and models, different specifications and capabilities, all affect the comfort - or lack of it - of the pilot in the pod. And other intangible considerations, too: more than one pilot has been known to complain that this Vagabond, this Falcon, this Megathron, is just not as comfortable as the last.

Many a Chief Engineer has spent hours hunting for undetectable flaws and cursing their employer's eccentricities.

This pilot, though, had no such sense of nagging incongruity as he stretched his consciousness out through the kilometers of corridors and ducts of his Chimera-class carrier. This ship was not new, not unfamiliar. It was, in fact, home, in the pod or out of it, and the flood of information that poured through the pod implants was a background hum as reassuring and unnoticed as the beat of his own heart.

The ship had a heart, too, although the core life-support processors didn't beat, but hummed a steady whirr. Air hissed through vents and was drawn back again, washed through the scrubbers, pumped past the green leaves of the plants in the hydrobays and sent on its way again. Across the ship, machinery kept up its pace while redundant systems were in various stages of power-down or maintenance cycles.

The bipedal carbon-based components of the ship performed their tasks with the same reliable consistency, or moved through the rest and recreation stages necessary to peak efficiency. In one compartment, staff from engineering discussed improvements to the capacitor output mix over a game of cards; in another professions of undying love were offered and received; the muffled Rat-tat-tat. Rat. Tat of marines at pistol practice came from the range. A woman was singing as she switched out relay circuits in the cargo hold, a child was crying quietly in compartment 1583C, a med-tech sighing with relief as he looked at a test result ...

For the ship, all these sounds were of equal importance, or lack of it: non-operational background noise, of far less relevance than the hum of the capacitor or the whine of the shield buffer.

But the ship was not just a ship, when the human pilot was in pod, just as the human pilot was not only human when he was encased in the ship's embrace.

A child crying.

Responding to the pilot's interest the ship's systems sorted and ordered the flood of information with a new set of priorities. The sound was separated out from the quiet babble picked up by sensors all around the ship, identified, pin-pointed.

The neural links withdrew and the pod seal opened. The pilot slid through the decanting chamber and to the floor below, enduring the indignities of the process stoically. Jets of warm water sluiced away the pod-fluid before a blast of hot air dried the moisture from his skin. A uniform, immaculately pressed, was laid ready. Mere moments after that single anomalous sound had caught his attention, the captain stood before the door of compartment 1583C.

He pressed the call button by the door frame. "Camille? It's Silver. May I come in?"

At Camille's assent, muffled but intelligible, he keyed the door open.

The room, with its profusion of vegetative artwork, was of course familiar. The small red-headed girl sitting in the far left corner, hugging her knees to her chest, was less so.

"Camille, it's past twenty-three hundred. Shouldn't you be asleep?"

Camille sniffled without looking up. "Couldn't sleep," she said.

"I see." Silver paused. "Do you think you might be better able to sleep if you went to bed?"

The girl shook her head. "I feel better here," she said.

"I see," Silver said again, although in fact he did not, in more than the strictly literal sense, see. "Do you mind if I join you?"

"Yes," Camille said. "I mean, no. I don't mind." She shuffled herself sideways a bit, making room for him in the narrow wedge of space between Commander Invelen's desk and the wall.

Silver lowered himself down to sit beside her, his back to the ventilation duct, the faint hum of the life-support processors distantly audible under the gentle hiss of air, the constant whirr of the Utopian Ideal's heart, not, of course, a human heart that beat a steady rhythm but an artificial heart that hummed steadily without pause, much as -

I see.

He hesitated, and cleared his throat slightly. "I imagine you miss your sisters quite a bit. Cia. And Ami."

"I'm not crying," Camille said.

"I can see that," Silver assured her.

"And even if I was, sometime even marines cry." Camille sniffled again and wiped at one eye with her sleeve. "But I'm not."

Silver offered her his handkerchief. "Certainly not."

"Thanks." Camille took the handkerchief and blew her nose.

"You're welcome."

Camille blew her nose again. "I'm a bit worried about Ami," she admitted softly.

"Cia will take good care of her."

"I know," Camille said with a sigh. "Cia's good when you're sad. It's nice she's good for something." She held out the handkerchief to him. "Thanks."

"Ah, you should keep that. In case you need it again," Silver said quickly.

"Okay." Camille tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve.

"When you can't sleep, at home, what do you do?" Silver asked.

"Cia usually makes me hot chocolate," Camille said.

"And that helps?"

Camille nodded. "Yeah."

"I'm sure the officers' mess could send up some hot chocolate, if you wanted," Silver said.

"It's okay," Camille said sadly. "It wouldn't be the same. I think I'm just going to sit here for a bit."

Silver nodded. "Do you mind if I sit with you?"

"No," Camille said. "That'd be okay."

"Good."

Camille sighed again, and shuffled herself a little closer to Silver. "Silver?"

"Yes, Camille?"

"Cia said you're not very used to little kids."

"I suppose that's true," Silver said.

Camille leaned her head against his shoulder. "It's okay, though. You don't need to worry about it. I'm nearly nearly-ten, and when I'm ten I'll be nearly big enough to start training to be a marine, and that's practically almost grown up. So don't worry. I won't be a kid much longer."

"I will," Silver reassured her, "do my best not to worry about it."

"Good," Camille said, and fell silent again.

A thought brought up the interface for Silver's internal neocom, another created a memo for the Facilities and Maintenance division. Work order: Commander Invelen's quarters, compartment 1583C. Temporary relocation of bed to far left corner of compartment, adjacent to ventilation duct. Work to be completed next main-day shift.

He let the interface fade from his vision and glanced down at the top of Camille's head, her ginger hair a vivid contrast to the dark blue of his uniform. The slow regularity of her breathing and her limp weight indicated that she had fallen asleep.

Given the lateness of the hour, that was not unexpected.

What Silver had not expected was his own discovery that he did not, altogether, mind.

Conversations on the Utopian Ideal: Twenty Two

Isala Haya had, in twenty-five years of service, seen it all.

He'd waited on Captain Katamara as a junior steward on the Blue Star the night the Captain had dined with Ruunuken Vulli and Tsilo Ralttilo, and never breathed a word of what he'd overheard.  He'd poured wine for Mens Reppola without spilling a drop, pulled out chairs for C.E.O.s and pirate lords and podders with equanimity, and even, in the recent years of his employment as Captain Night's chief steward, Sansha. 

But spirits and ancestors, there are some things nothing can prepare one to see at the Captain's table.

It wasn't Captain Night's guest's spectacular black eye - there had been plenty of occasions when Commander Invelen had eaten her dinner with an icepack handy for whatever bruises she'd acquired that day.

It wasn't the less-than-impeccable table manners, either - customs differed throughout the Cluster and no Chief Steward worth the salt in the Captain's silver salt-shaker would turn a hair even if a dinner guest picked up the finger bowl and drank it.

But of all the things Chief Haya had seen in his long and varied career, a small child at Captain Night's table had to be the most unlikely of them all.

Unlikelier still, the girl seemed quite at home, black eye and all. Haya himself had never exchanged more words with Captain Night than the minimum required for food and wine to be ordered and delivered, and if the ancestors love me they'll keep it that way, but Miss Camille Roth chattered away at the Captain as if he were, well, a normal person.

In three years of waiting on the Captain's table, Haya had observed many things about his employer: that he had impeccable manners; that he not only ordered, but also appreciated, wine of exquisite quality and breathtaking expense; that no reason short of a hull breach would see him appear in the officer's mess wearing informal attire.

And if Captain Night treated the crew with slightly distant formality, if he sometimes went days at a time without leaving his capsule, if he had the unsettling habit of occasionally looking through his Chief Steward as if the presence of another human being was a momentary distraction from the contemplation of warp vectors and jump points, well, what else could be expected?

The Captain was a capsuleer. He was immortal, impossibly powerful.

He was most definitely not normal. 

The little girl's apparent blithe disregard for that simple fact unsettled the foundations of Haya's universe, but what rocked them to their core was the fact that Captain Night didn't seem to mind.

None of his internal turmoil showing on his face, Chief Haya inclined his head in acknowledgment of the Captain's order of seafood for himself and a cheeseburger for the child and took himself back to the galley to recover his composure a little.

"... say sister," one of the junior stewards was telling another as they washed the fine china dishes that no cleaner drone could be trusted with, "But do the math, right? No-one knows where she - "

"Mister Makkura," Haya said frostily. "There will be no gossip in my kitchen while the Captain's at table."

"No, chief!" Makkura said quickly.

"Kaalioka Trefin, quickly now. And a cheeseburger."

Haya watched closely as the food was prepared, but as usual, could find nothing that fell short of his exacting standards. At the head of a small procession of junior stewards, he returned to the officer's mess.

"You know what is very important, when you fly fighters?" Captain Night was saying to the little girl as they entered.

"What?" she asked.

"Picking your fights very carefully," Captain Night said.

Haya decided that he had clearly either inadvertently eaten something with hallucinatory side-effects or the Sansha invaders' rumored wormholes led, in fact, to an alternate reality, because the only other possibility he could think of was that Captain Night was, in fact, imparting avuncular advice to Commander Invelen's eight year old adopted sister, and that clearly wasn't happening.


The comforting conviction that he had simply lost touch with a reality that nevertheless retained its accustomed shape and was waiting for him to rejoin it, let Haya view with equanimity Captain Night agreeing with Miss Roth that indeed, biting was an option when one was losing a fight, although more general strategies were also useful to have. It carried him through half-heard snatches of conversation about gardening and it withstood Miss Roth asking the Captain Did you always know who you were going to be? Like, when you were my age? and the Captain actually answering. It wavered a little at Captain Night reassuring Miss Roth that in his opinion, she didn't need to be afraid of growing up to be an accountant.

It buckled completely when Captain Night gave his dessert order.

Chief Steward Isala Haya was a seasoned officer. He inclined his head in acknowledgement, turned precisely on his heel and strode into the galley to relay the order. He stared down the junior stewards with a glare that said the first person in my galley to comment will be scrubbing pots until the end of time. He supervised the preparation of the dessert the Captain had chosen and its delivery to the table.  When the Captain and his guest had finished their meal, shaken hands with all the formality any Deteis could desire, and gone their separate ways, Haya oversaw the clearing of the table and the careful cleaning of the irreplaceable cutlery and crockery.

Then he dismissed his juniors, and locked the door behind them.

In twenty five years of service Chief Steward Isala Haya had never once taken even the smallest liberty with the ship's stores or the Captain's property.

There is, he thought, as he took down a bottle of the Captain's least expensive hak'len and poured himself a precise single measure, a first time for everything.

For drinking the Captain's liquor. 

For eight year olds at the Captain's table.

He tossed the hak'len back, shuddering a little at the alcohol and a little at the memory.

For two chocolate milkshakes.

With, spirits help me ...

With extra chocolate.

Conversations on the Utopian Ideal: Twenty One

The girl was eight years old but she had a black-eye worthy of a heavy-weight prize fighter and a scowl that wouldn't have been out of place on the face of a Civire bouncer.  An air of don't-want-to-be-here radiated off her like heat shimmer from warp-core housing, and had been since Inola Toras had dragged her off a Brutor boy a year older and twice her weight and marched her into the empty classroom.

The boy was on his way to medical.  By the time the sixth sense for trouble that Inola had developed over twenty years of teaching had sent her down the hall to the lunch-room at a run,  Commander Invelen's sister's excellent impression of a small, red-headed whirling dervish had done considerable damage.

Not the first fight Irt Kalur has been in, Inola thought, but quite possibly the first he's lost.

"Miss Roth?" Inola asked the small bundle of resentment sitting in front of her.  "I asked you a question."

Camille Roth folded her arms and sighed. "I know."

Inola folded her own arms. "Are you going to answer it?"

"No."

Inola's sigh was internal, twenty years of teaching having given her more than a little self-restraint when it came to dealing with miniature miscreants.  "Miss Roth, that's not an acceptable response. Why were you fighting?"

Camille shook her head. "That's not any of your business."

"Children fighting in my classroom most certainly is my business, Miss Roth."

"We weren't in your classroom."

Strictly speaking, true. "You were in the lunchroom after you were in my classroom, and that's not an excuse. And I know you've only been here a few days, but that's not an excuse either. What would Commander Invelen say if she heard you'd been fighting?"

"She'd ask if I won," Camille said.

Quite possibly true, Inola thought, given some of the rumors about the Commander. "I think she'd be unhappy you got in trouble. We don't allow fighting here, Miss Roth."

The little girl stuck out her chin and said stolidly, "Then I guess you better punish me."

"I need to know what happened to know who deserves punishment, and how much. Did Mr Kalur start it?"

"I'm not saying."

"Miss Roth. Camille. I know that when you come to a new place, it can be hard to fit in. Sometimes the other kids want to make sure you know who the boss is, yes? Is that what happened?"

Camille's expression didn't change. "I'm not saying."

"If you don't tell me what happened, I'll have to punish you both."

"Good," Camille said.

"You want me to punish you?" Inola asked.

Camille rolled her eyes. "If you don't, the other kids will think it's because of whose sister I am."

Ah ha, Inola thought. "Is that what happened? Mr Kalur thought you were getting preferential treatment because you're Commander Invelen's sister?"

"No. And I'm not saying."

"If the other kids are teasing you, I can make them stop, if you tell me."

"Ms Toras," Camille said patiently, "If I tell you, then I'll be a tattletale. And they will stop, now. I proved he was wrong."

"Mr Kalur? Proved he was wrong about what?"

"About Ami. I proved he was wrong on his body."

Inola blinked. "On his body?"

Camille sighed again and gave Inola a pitying look. "He's Yushkal clan," she said, clearly thinking that explained everything.

It took Inola a moment to dredge up what she knew about Irt Kalur's clan background, and then Camille's words made sense. Yushkal clan, one of the Brutor clans with a long tradition of trial by combat. "He said something about Commander Invelen and you challenged him to prove the truth of it with a fight?"

"I'm not saying," Camille said, but her expression gave her away. "And it wasn't true, anyway!"

"What wasn't true?" Inola asked gently.

"She's not a Sansha!" Camille burst out, glaring at Inola. "Ishukone made her arms, not the Sansha! And she hasn't let the crew down, either, that's not fair! It's not her fault! She's the best XO ever and it's not because she's Silver's girlfriend!"

Oh.

Inola pulled out the chair from the desk nearest to Camille's and sat down, used to compressing herself into a piece of furniture made for eight-year-olds.  "Honey, no-one thinks  that about your sister."

Camille blinked hard, tears trembling on her eyelashes. "They say it."

"This is the first time you've lived in a crew, isn't it?" Inola asked.

"Cia has crew!"

"Your other sister, Captain Roth? She has crew, but do the two of you live with them, do you go to school with their kids, like you do here?"

"No," Camille admitted.

"Well," Inola said. "A crew is bigger than a family, but it's not like a station, either. People know lots of other people, especially someone like Commander Invelen. She's in charge of everybody, right, after Captain Night?"

Camille nodded, and unfolded her arms long enough to swipe surreptitiously at one damp cheek.

"And sometimes grown-ups, they say things they don't mean. And they don't think that kids overhear them, or they think their kids know they aren't serious, but the kids don't always know. Right?'

Camille nodded again.

"So you don't need to take it to heart, something like that. It doesn't mean anything.  You just ignore it next time."

"There won't be a next time," Camille said, with a certainty that could easily have belonged to her sister.

"There won't be a next time for fighting, either. Will there, Camille?"

Camille heaved a sigh. "I'll try," she said. "I do try, you know, Ms Toras. But it's a lot of work, sometimes."

Inola let herself smile. "I know, honey. It's a lot of work for everyone, sometimes."

Camille nodded.

"You tell a teacher next time someone says something mean, okay?"

"Oh, it'll be okay," Camille said. "Irt is the leader. That's why I picked him."

Kalur is the leader, Inola thought, studying the girl. Headed for a good career as an NCO, if he can learn to control his temper rather than letting it control him. "Do you want to be the leader, Camille? Is that why you fought him?"

Camille rolled her eyes again. "I am the leader, Ms Toras. They just don't know it yet.  How are you going to punish me?"

"I think this time we'll say that a warning is enough, Camille, since you're new."

"No!" Camille said indignantly. "You have to punish me! If you don't, it won't work!"

"I see," Inola said, and she did. The formal curriculum for the children of Captain Night's crew focused aptitudes and trained skills, but there was an informal curriculum that the teachers kept an equally close eye on. Who leads, who follows. Which ones make peace, which ones get their friends working together, which ones can't suffer fools ... 


The ever-shifting relationships in a class of five-year-olds settled and hardened as time passed, under the teachers' watchful eye. By the time they graduated, their files would have reports on the intangible complexities of personality as well as their academic achievements, making sure they were slotted in to the right place in the massive human machinery of the crew.

And in that process, the ideas of settling things yourself versus tattling to the teacher, of being the defiant martyr as opposed to the teacher's pet, those ideas carried a certain weight.

"All right, Miss Roth," Inola said. "Report here at zero seven hundred tomorrow morning for cleaning duty. You'll be making this classroom shine every morning before the other students arrive, and you'll clean up after them when they leave at the end of the day."

Camille nodded. "Okay!" she said. "Can I go?"

"Yes. Go on to medical and get your eye looked at before dinner."

"I will!" Camille stood up. "Thanks, Ms Toras! I'm sorry I caused you trouble, but you know. Sometimes you just have to."

Inola turned in the under-sized chair to watch the girl leave. For a moment longer, she sat looking at the door.

I am the leader. 


They just don't know it yet. 


Inola shook her head, and unfolded herself slowly. They might not know it yet, she thought.

But they will.