Her stomach knotted up with worry, impatient for a response.
When her mother finally typed out her reply, Molly realized she hadn’t been queasy enough.
I NEED TO SPEAK WITH THE DRENARD. ALONE. AS SOON AS POSSIBLE_
2
“Should I go wake her?” Cole leaned forward, his hands on the armrests of his seat. Molly couldn’t tell if he was eager to help or just feeling the urge to get away from the nav computer before it said something even more peculiar.
She looked from the screen, to Cole, then back again. Shrugging, unable to make sense of anything herself, she whispered, “I guess so.” Her voice sounded weak and feeble to her own ears, as if temporarily stunned.
Cole crawled out of his chair and padded away, leaving Molly alone with the computer once again. She reached for her keyboard, partly obliged to keep her mother occupied—not sure what the passage of a few minutes might feel like to a consciousness that could compute billions of operations a second—but also in an attempt to alleviate some of her confusion.
MOM_
She wasn’t sure how to phrase what she felt, so finally settled on being completely honest: YOU’RE SCARING ME_
I’M SORRY. IT ISN’T LIKE THIS IS EASY FOR ME. I_ THERE IS SO MUCH I WANT TO TELL YOU, TO CATCH UP ON. THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU, WE WEREN’T EVEN SURE IF YOU WOULD LIVE FOR A YEAR. AND I WAS VERY SICK. EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT YOU ARE JUST FACTS GIVEN TO ME LATER. I’M SORRY, IS THE DRENARD THERE YET?_
NO, COLE IS WAKING HER UP. WE’RE ON A NIGHT SHIFT. AND HER NAME IS ANLYN _
VERY WELL. PLEASE INTERRUPT ME AS SOON AS ANLYN IS THERE. WHAT I WANTED TO EXPLAIN EARLIER IS THAT MY WORLD FEELS VERY STRANGE RIGHT NOW. STRANGER, PERHAPS, THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE. I HAVE MY THOUGHTS, AND THEY SEEM LIKE A WAKING DREAM. LIKE I’M IN A DARK ROOM WITH MY EYES CLOSED, ALONE WITH MY MEMORIES_
Molly heard someone stomping through the cargo bay. She peered around her seat and saw Cole heading her way, Anlyn in tow. The young alien had on one of Cole’s oversized shirts as a nightgown, and was wiping sleep from her eyes.
Holding up a hand, Molly urged Cole to stay back for a moment. She felt guilty for delaying her mom’s conversation with Anlyn, but she needed to hear more:
THEY COME SO FAST, MOLLIE. I HAVE TO TRY AND OCCUPY PROCESSING CYCLES BY DOING OTHER THINGS IN THE BACKGROUND. ALL I HAVE FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS THE TEXT YOU INPUT. JUST WORDS IN A VACUUM. I’M JUST AS SCARED AS YOU ARE, SWEETHEART, AND SOME OF THE THINGS I KNOW ARE TRULY AWFUL. NOT ANYTHING I WANT TO BURDEN YOU WITH RIGHT NOW. IS ANLYN THERE?_
SHE JUST WALKED UP_
Technically, it was the truth. She turned to Anlyn, only to find her friend standing just beyond the boundary of the cockpit, her face rigid and expressionless.
“I’m so sorry!” said Molly, scrambling out of her seat and sickened by her thoughtlessness.
Anlyn hadn’t been in a cockpit since she escaped the Darrin system, where she’d been chained to a flightseat and forced to pilot a ship as a slave. In all the excitement over her mom, her friend’s fears had slipped her mind. She pushed past Cole to turn Anlyn away, but before she could get to her, the young Drenard stepped over the boundary, crossing the threshold.
“It’s fine,” Anlyn said softly. She held both hands out in front of her as she crept forward, almost as if probing for obstructions. “As long as the engines are off.”
“Are you sure?”
Anlyn nodded, her face aglow in the cockpit’s constellation of lights and readouts. Looking around, her eyes eventually settling on the radio set into the dash. “Cole said you need me to talk to someone?”
Molly was unsure what should be revealed. She hated lying, but the truth would take hours to relate. She decided to leave it up to her mom to explain it however she liked.
“That’s right. You’ll have to communicate with—” Molly paused, realizing how little she knew of Parsona’s young crewmembers, even after two weeks of living together. “You’ll have to talk using the keyboard. Can you read and type? In English?”
Disappointment flashed across Anlyn’s face. “Not much,” she admitted. “Enough to fly, mostly indicators and alarms.”
Of course, Molly thought. Why teach a slave pilot to read anything else? She turned back to the nav computer, a surge of guilty relief washing over her. There had been enough secrets lately—translating the conversation would keep her from not knowing what was going on. And assuming the worst.
She leaned over her seat and typed:
ANLYN SPEAKS ENGLISH, BUT SHE CAN’T TYPE OR READ MUCH OF IT. I’M GOING TO HAVE TO INTERPRET_
There was almost no pause before the reply came:
SHE DOESN’T NEED TO RESPOND, SHE JUST NEEDS TO READ ALONG. TELL HER TO PRESS A KEY ONCE THE TWO OF US ARE ALONE. AND PLEASE GIVE US PLENTY OF TIME_
MOM, SHE CAN’T READ ENGLISH_
THAT’S OKAY, DEAR. I SPEAK DRENARD_
••••
Cole and Molly retired to the lazarette. He had suggested they wait the conversation out in her room while discussing their plans, but Molly seemed too anxious to sit still. She had grabbed some tools and crawled into the thruster room—the center reactor was still having intermittent issues ever since they backed into that asteroid in the Darrin system.
Cole didn’t have much room to argue since he’d been the one flying at the time.
Holding a medium spanner out in the air, he waited for Molly to reach up and grab it. “Can our nav screen even display Drenard?” he wondered aloud. “I don’t even know what Drenard looks like, do you?”
“Not a clue,” Molly said. Her voice leaked out from below the center thruster’s reactor, tinny and muffled. A hand came up holding a power screwdriver; Cole took it and slapped the electric wrench in its place. “I don’t see why it couldn’t display it, though,” Molly continued. “That screen can show star charts. Any language is just a bunch of pixels.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Cole. He put the screwdriver back in the tool pouch; below, he could hear Molly wrestling with an overly tightened bolt. “Hey, maybe we should let Edison have another go at that.”
“I like knowing my own ship, smarty pants. Besides, Edison would have to pull the floor beams out just to get down here. Probably why it’s still acting up.” Molly pushed her upper body out of the hole and looked back at Cole. “The question we should be asking ourselves is why we had to leave the cockpit if Mom is talking in Drenard. It’s not like either of us could follow what she’s saying. And how does she know Drenard in the first place? I always heard the language was a complete mystery, even to the Navy.”
She left her doubts in the air and went back to work, her head disappearing below the decking.
Cole felt relieved to hear some of his cynicism rubbing off on Molly. Prior to recent and unfortunate events, she used to think him pessimistic and paranoid. Conspiratorial, even. He moved closer to the access hatch. “Have you ever heard of the Turing Test?” he asked.
“I’ve heard of the Turing star system,” Molly said after a pause.
“Yeah, same guy. It was named after him. He was an old twenty first century math dude, or maybe it was the twentieth, I get those periods confused—”
“What in the world does this have to do with anything?”
“I’ll get to that if you stop interrupting. You see, Turing was one of the first guys to start thinking about artificial intelligence—”
“Is that what you think my mom is?”
“Gods, Molly, gimme a chance. And I can barely make out what you’re saying, anyway. Where was I? Oh, Turing devised what he called the Turing Test as a check for artificial intelligence. What you do is put your program in a room and talk to it through a door, or some other way, the important bit is this—if you can’t tell the thing on the other side is human or machine, it passes the test.”
Cole inched deeper into the mechanical space to make sure his voice was dropping down the hole in the floor. “Did you hear me?”
“I’m not interrupting you.”
“Well, that was it. That’s the story.”
Molly pulled her head out of the hole again. “What’s the point?”
“The point is, whatever we’re talking with passes the Turing Test, but that doesn’t tell us if it’s human or not. In fact, there’s this other guy, Surrel I think his name was, who came up with another scenario called the Chinese Room.
“You know, your mom speaking Drenard must have made me remember Turing. Anyway, Surrel said that you could have something stupid in a room, a simple program or a book that would look intelligent, but it wouldn’t be. It goes something like this: you have a man in another room that doesn’t speak Drenard. But he has a book of rules. Someone slides a piece of paper under the door with some Drenard on it. The guy looks in the book, follows the rules, and writes out a reply.
“The person on the other side will think they’re communicating with a real Drenard. The Turing Test will be passed. But the guy inside the room, or the program, is just following simple rules. And that’s all a computer does, really. Follow rules. It can look smart without being smart.”
Molly shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m listening to this instead of fixing the pressure problem with the thruster.”
“Hey, this stuff’s important. You need to keep it in mind when you’re talking to your mom.”
Molly grabbed a clump of hair off her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. She rolled her eyes at Cole. “That Surrel guy was an idiot, just so you know.”
“I think I have his name wrong,” Cole said, “but trust me: the guy was a genius.”
“Well, I must be a Glemot, then. The guy following the rules might be dumb, but the woman who wrote the rules for him to follow speaks Drenard fluently and is quite intelligent. Which means there is a smart person in the room that’s passing the Turing Test, not just some algorithm. It doesn’t matter if she wrote her smartness down or was sitting beside the guy whispering the answers; if the result’s the same, the delivery method shouldn’t matter.”
Molly bit her lower lip and glanced past Cole. “Whether it’s a brain or a computer holding her memories–either way–I think that’s my mom out there.”
She ducked down below the decking, then popped back up. “And this is what I hate about these philosophy debates you drag me into. The questions are only baffling if you have the IQ of a Venusian sea slug—”
“Wait,” Cole interrupted, lifting a hand. “Did you hear that?”
They both fell silent. “That’s the SADAR alarm,” Molly said.
Cole scrambled backwards, out of the cramped space. Molly followed after, her hands leaving greasy prints on the decking. They both rose and sprinted toward the cockpit, forty meters away, the pounding of their feet on the metal decking waking the rest of the crew.
••••
“Contacts! At least two dozen ships!” Cole looked from the SADAR screen to the porthole on his side of the ship. A small fleet had appeared off their starboard side. Anlyn backed out of the cockpit, her eyes still on the nav screen, which remained full of bizarre symbols.
“Everyone in flight suits!” Molly called out, which broke Anlyn’s spell and sent her scurrying back toward the crew quarters.
“That includes you,” said Cole.
Molly looked down at her dirty work shirt and greasy hands as if confirming his suggestion. “Okay,” she said, “turn on the radio and find out who they are. And tell Mom what’s going on. I’ll be right back.” She left him alone in the cockpit and raced back to her room.
Cole plugged his own suit into the console between the seats. He put the radio on channel 2812, the galaxy-wide standard for hailing and ship-to-ship communications.
Someone was already transmitting.
“—yourself. Repeat. This is Naval Task Force Delta KPR76 calling the vessel point two AU’s off our bow, velocity zero knots absolute, identify yourself.”
Cole’s nav screen was covered in gibberish. He typed in a quick line to whoever was on the other side of Turing’s door.
TROUBLE. GOTTA RUN_
He hit the enter key and switched over to the Bel Tra nav charts. Comparing Parsona’s location to the position of the Navy fleet made his stomach drop. He heard someone run up behind him.
“Troublesss?”
Walter. His hissing voice scraped across Cole’s nerves even more than usual. “Go strap in,” he told him, “and stay out of the way.” He didn’t look back to see the expression on the boy’s face, which was just as well.
The next set of approaching feet left no doubt as to their owner. The vibrations came up through Cole’s nav chair as Edison stomped his way to the crew seats. Cole flipped on the cargo bay cam and made sure everyone had their helmets on and their harnesses secure. This would be the first time Anlyn wore one of Walter’s flight suits; he hoped his alterations would keep her smaller frame protected.
The radio demanded identification again just as Molly arrived in a dead run. She vaulted into her chair, landed on her feet in a crouch, and then let them shoot out from under herself into the pocket below the dash. She fastened her harness and plugged in her flightsuit, all with the coordinated swiftness of an emergency drill.
“Navy?” she asked.
“Yeah, and we’re in a spot here.” Cole pointed to the SADAR. “My anniversary gift is the hard place and that fleet is the rock.”
••••
Molly looked out her porthole. The “gift” Cole referred to loomed off the port side of the ship. It was a binary pair—a black hole and a large star locked in each other’s orbits. A wide trail of plasma leaked off the star and swirled into the black hole, the rotation of the system creating a pinwheel of light millions of kilometers across.