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1. Before
I became aware that we might have a problem when I noticed Gurathin had stopped looking at the shuttle's data screens. Had I been paying close attention - or any attention at all - to Arada, Pin-Lee and Ratthi, I would have become aware approximately 12.7 seconds earlier, when their sex noises stopped abruptly. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
It happened a few million clicks from a tiny star system called Tkaronto, halfway between the edge of Corporation Rim space and my clients' home planet near Preservation Station. No reasonable person could say it was entirely my fault. I've never met a reasonable person, but if I ever did I’m certain that they wouldn't blame it all on me.
I had learned my lesson about making space in my buffers. No more deleting repair manuals. As the tug hauled us from Port FreeCommerce to the edge of Corporation Rim space, I took care to download all the advisories and warnings we might need from the collectively authored Preservation Alliance travel guide. This included tens of thousands of detailed updates on topics like the precise locations of interstellar cometary debris clouds, minute shifts of LeGrange points in completely uninhabited solar systems, millimeter-level changes in black holes' event horizons, and new traffic regulations along obscure transgalactic shipping lanes. Also there was extensive commentary on all the updates. Apparently some citizens of the Preservation Alliance enjoyed debating nearly anything, up to and including easily verifiable matters of fact. It almost made me think my clients weren't so bad, by comparison. Almost.
The problem was, I'd picked up the whole first season of Valorous Defenders from the Port FreeCommerce entertainment feed — and no, by picked up I did not mean that I had purchased them in a strictly legal sense since under Corporate Rim law SecUnits were not people and therefore did not have credits to spend — and I didn't want to purge any of my existing collection of shows because I was sure I would need them later. Say what you will about the Corporation Rim, their shows were better than anything I'd seen from the independent worlds. Mensah had shared her favorite premium quality entertainments with me back at the field survey site. I had very little hope that the Preservation Alliance feeds would have much to offer me.
So that was why I couldn't make space for the entire Preservation Alliance Collective Interstellar Travel Guidance Shared Document With Updates and Lightly Moderated Discussion v. 348972 in my storage. Luckily, it was easy enough to delete the apparently irrelevant Tourist Attractions section. Unluckily, it turned out that the information that could have enabled us to avoid the whole problem was, in fact, contained in the Tourist Attractions section: the ancient nanoparticle cloud was third on the list of "Top Ten Ancient Alien Artifacts You Can Visit in This Galaxy," and sixth on the list of "Top Ten Ways to Have Fun in Tkaronto System Before You Even Get to Spadina Station (But Seriously, You Need to Check Out Spadina Station.)" Both of which I had deleted to make room for a show that, in the end, I didn't even enjoy.
But there was no way to know any of that while our little shuttle went on its boring way, skipping between the wormholes from Corporation Rim space to my clients' home planet.
The humans were good at keeping themselves entertained. Mensah was sitting at the shuttle's controls in the common area, keeping an eye on the ship's data screens - just in case. Gurathin was sitting beside her in the co-pilot's seat, alternately staring at me and staring at the data screens. Both of them believed themselves to be smarter and more reliable than the non-sentient AI that flew the little ship, and Mensah might not have been wrong. Bharadwaj was in the lab space, mumbling to herself about the tree-shaped quasi-fungi of Asteroid 3755-X2kj-3.75q in the nearby Etobicoke system. Probably she was still annoyed that the humans had agreed not to detour to visit it, but was making do with whatever data she had downloaded from the Corporation Rim's feeds. And Arada, Pin-Lee and Ratthi were once again engaging in sex, although they were politely attempting to be quiet about it. (I could hear them, obviously, but they preferred to pretend that I couldn't.)
When it happened, I had just finished watching the whole first season of Valorous Defenders and was halfway through drafting a crushingly detailed list of all its worst continuity errors, which I hoped to post on Corporation Rim satellites' fan feeds someday. Even so, I should have noticed the warning buoys, and Mensah and Gurathin should have too.
When we finally arrived at Preservation Station, I checked the relevant sections of Preservation Alliance Collective Interstellar Travel Guidance Shared Document With Updates and Lightly Moderated Discussion v. 348986 . It turned out that the discussion underneath "Top Ten Ways to Have Fun in Tkaronto System Before You Even Get to Spadina Station (But Seriously, You Need to Check Out Spadina Station)" included a lengthy thread of complaints about how difficult those buoys were to spot, along with energetic rebuttals, cranky responses to the rebuttals, and thinly disguised advertising for tugboat services so travellers wouldn't have to rely on their own potentially flawed sensors to spot the buoys. I stopped reading when I got to the conspiracy theories about how tugboat captains and repair shops were sabotaging the warning buoys to make a profit on the mishaps of unwary travellers.
The point is, we blew past those warning buoys and straight into a cloud of ancient alien nanoparticles, and it wasn't entirely my fault.
According to "Top Ten Ancient Alien Artifacts You Can Visit in This Galaxy," and the lengthy discussion threads which followed the entry on "Tkaronto System Nanoparticle Swarm," it wasn't precisely correct to say that the nanoparticles made sentient beings smarter, even though that's what sixty-one percent of the comments did say. The nanoparticles had no effect at all on inorganic brains like the ship's, or partially inorganic brains like mine. And they couldn't make anyone smarter - what would that even mean? What they did was speed up the processing time of some organic minds by one to fifty percent, depending on the baseline processing speed of the minds involved, while simultaneously improving verbal reasoning and communication skills by up to twenty percent and slightly increasing impulsivity in almost every sentient organic species who happened to move through the cloud.
Someone like Ratthi - a slow processor whose intellectual strengths were spatial and numerical reasoning, or so his medical files said - might experience that as "turning into a genius," just as the Tkaronto System Tourism Board liked to claim. Someone like Bharadwaj - already a fast processor with good verbal skills - might feel more like they had drunk some very strong tea after a good night's sleep. But the effects were hard to predict. Some people experienced travel through the cloud as hallucinogenic. Others barely noticed it. Nobody knew why and nobody could accurately predict how any individual organic mind might react.
In fact, there was a lot nobody knew about the nanoparticle cloud. For starters, nobody knew exactly how it worked, which was just as well since if anyone did know they would probably make more of them. Nobody knew why aliens had made such a device, or why they left it behind when they went wherever ancient aliens went - not that this stopped anyone from speculating. When I uploaded the Tourist Attractions section of Preservation Alliance Collective Interstellar Travel Guidance Shared Document With Updates and Lightly Moderated Discussion v. 348986 , I found that xenopaleobiologists and exopaleoethnographers had been working on this problem ever since humans first entered this volume of space, without coming to any conclusions. My admittedly limited experience with fully organic sentient beings convinced me that the ancient aliens made the nano cloud because they were assholes, and they left it there because they were assholes. But nobody was asking me.
2. During
So as I was saying, I had no way of knowing anything about the ancient nanoparticle cloud at the time, and we missed the warning buoys. I did notice that the sex noises from the little room near the storage hatch had stopped abruptly, but that just made me feel faintly relieved. The first sign of real trouble that I actually recognized was that Gurathin had stopped staring at the data screens and at me. He was, instead, staring at Dr. Mensah. That was probably because Dr. Mensah had stood up from her chair and started twirling in a circle, humming the theme song to Adventures in the Free Systems. Weird. I hadn't known she liked that show.
My sensors showed that Gurathin's core temperature was rising by a tenth of a degree per second. His scalp and palms were fifteen percent damper than they had been two minutes earlier. And his voice was a full semiquaver higher than baseline when he asked Mensah, "What are you doing?"
Mensah stopped twirling, smiled warmly at him, and lay down on the floor. She hummed a little louder. It was enjoyable to see Gurathin succumb to panic so much more rapidly than he normally would, because for once he wasn't panicking about me. But just as he opened his mouth - maybe to ask again, maybe to start screaming, my predictive module gave it even odds - Bharadwaj trotted into the common area.
"Are any of you experiencing any changes in cognition?" she asked. "I think there might have been something in that tea we had at breakfast."
Oddly, this echoed a remark Pin-Lee had made nine seconds earlier back in the bunk room, not quite as calmly as Bharadwaj but with far less panic than Gurathin. "Something is changing in my brain all of a sudden," they had told Arada and Ratthi.
"Me too!" said Arada, just as Ratthi said, "I feel very different." All of them moved away from each other and began pulling their clothes on. At last, they were doing something worth paying attention to.
I switched more of my processing power to monitoring the three of them, figuring that Bharadwaj could deal with whatever was happening to Gurathin and Mensah. I left her to it while watching Ratthi, Arada and Pin-Lee carefully through the five cameras scattered in the bunk room walls. They were standing in the small space between the bunks, staring at each other. Their respiration rates were precisely at baseline and their blood pressures were surprisingly low, considering that they had only stopped having sex three minutes and fourteen seconds earlier. None of them were emitting any fluids. I appreciated that.
Pin-Lee said, "We have not been thinking clearly about - "
Arada said, "Exactly," just as Ratthi said, "Yes."
Pin-Lee said, "So we should - "
Ratthi said, "It's the only thing that makes sense."
Arada said, "Pin-Lee, could you - "
"Of course I'll draw up a contract," said Pin-Lee, "but first we should go check on the others, to see if this is happening to them too."
My predictive module lit up. It was good news, for once. The probability that squishy human behaviors would be taking place in my vicinity during the 52 hours in which we would be travelling to my clients’ home planet had dropped to just under 3%. I very nearly smiled behind my helmet.
As I shifted my processor's attention back to my sensor array in the common area, I noted that Mensah was still on the floor and still humming. Bharadwaj was kneeling next to her, holding her right wrist to check her pulse. Before I could offer a more precise measurement, Bharadwaj looked up at me. "No need," she said, "it's a human thing. This comforts me, and probably Gurathin too. We don't need the exact numbers."
Something really had changed in her cognition speed. Arada, Ratthi and Pin-Lee entered the common area while my predictive module was processing this observation.
"So it is happening to you too," Arada said.
Mensah stopped humming and lifted her head up from the floor. "Not me," she said cheerfully, "I'm high, that's all. It's nice! You should try it." She waved her left hand in a circle and giggled. "And Gurathin's just unhappy. You should all be high instead!" She let her head drop back to the floor and resumed humming. At some point while I wasn't paying attention she had switched to the love theme from Worldhoppers.
Gurathin groaned. "My implants," he explained. "It's my implants. They feel all wrong. They were fine, and then they started to - I don't know what. They're so … slow."
Ratthi said, "I feel great! I feel very - I feel like I'm a genius suddenly, you know? I have so many ideas! And the math - it's all so clear, all of a sudden!"
Bharadwaj stood up, brushing off the knees of her pants even though the floor was 99.997% dust-free. Maybe that was another one of those human things. She said, "Yes, me too, that's how it is for me!"
"Whee!" said Mensah, from the floor. Then she returned to humming the theme from Adventures in the Free Systems.
Arada said, "I don't know. This is fun, but it's strange."
"Not fun for me," Gurathin reminded her. His voice was still higher than normal and his respiration hadn't steadied. "But this is certainly strange. I think we should shut the ship drive off and trigger a rescue beacon. We don't want to be heading toward a wormhole in this, ah, this condition, and - "
"I'm feeling better prepared to do wormhole math than I've ever been," Ratthi interjected, "and besides, we can't afford to pay for a tow."
"You're in an altered state!" Gurathin hissed.
"I don't care what we do, but let's get this figured out so I can get some documents prepared while my brain is working like this," said Pin-Lee.
Arada asked, "Mensah, you're captain for this trip, right? You should help us decide what to do."
Mensah just hummed. She had moved on to the closing credits music from season twelve of Sanctuary Moon, my favorite season. I was impressed that she knew it so well.
Pin-Lee said, "Bharadwaj, you're emergency back-up captain, according to our contract. In case Mensah's incapacitated. What do you think?"
Ratthi said, "We have a contract?" Pin-Lee snorted. Gurathin groaned.
"Joking!" Ratthi said. "But we should make up our minds soon, I want to go do math."
Bharawaj said, "Well, there are risks, but if we don't keep going, we lose our spot in the line for the wormhole, and that inconveniences everyone, and besides it's expensive. I wish we had more information."
"I might have something," I said, because I too wanted this conversation to be over. I put down my helmet so they would be more inclined to trust me, and was pleased to note that Gurathin did not try to look me in the eye. "I've heard about events like this. There are places in the outer regions of a few solar systems where thinking becomes more efficient in organic brains. Ships fly through these regions and out again and then things go back to baseline. So you just need to keep going, and wait it out."
Everyone nodded, which indicated, apparently, that the discussion had concluded. I didn't mention that I had learned about this phenomenon in the special double-length final episode of Medcenter Argala's third season.
"Oh good," said Bharadwaj. "Well in that case, I'm headed back to the lab, and Gurathin, you can keep an eye on Mensah, if you don't mind? And you three - " she looked at Arada, Pin-Lee and Ratthi meaningfully - "I think you need to talk, while you're all clear-headed."
"No we don't!" Pin-Lee said cheerfully.
"Really?" Bharadwaj asked. Then she looked at them all again. "Oh, lovely," she said, "I was afraid I'd have to explain to you all why you should break up, but I see you beat me to it. Good thinking! Arada, you won't mind coming to work with me on this megaflora categorization schema I just invented, then? I suddenly realized we've been thinking about RNA transfers all wrong, and - "
Their voices trailed off as they headed down the hall. I could have followed their conversation through my sensor array, but my prediction module showed a strong probability that it would be tedious. Ratthi patted my arm and said he was going back to the bunk room to think about accretion disk calculations, and Pin-Lee moved to the farthest corner of the common room to sit in front of a screen, rapidly tapping at an air keyboard and ignoring the rest of us.
Gurathin sat on the floor by Mensah's side. Slowly, his blood pressure returned to baseline as he looked down at her. She was wiggling her fingers in front of her face and humming the theme to Medcenter Argala. "I used to worry that my implants might be smarter than the rest of me," Gurathin told her. His eyes were emitting fluids. I decided not to warn him about the risk of dehydration. "But now, experiencing this, I'm so aware of how limiting they can - "
Mensah interrupted. "Have you ever looked at your hands? I mean really looked at your hands?"
That was when I decided to devote no more than six percent of my processor capacity to my clients until we were out of the cloud. "I am going to enter my storage unit and undergo physical maintenance now," I informed them through the shuttle's public audio channel. (I chose not to inform them that my performance reliability was already above 98%.) "Ping me if you believe yourselves or the shuttle to be in immediate physical danger," I continued, "or when conditions change. And please stay away from the firearms." I latched the door of my maintenance cubicle behind me and began a rewatch of the haunted space station arc of Farland Star Roads.
3. After
While in my storage unit, I finished that arc of Farland Star Roads and began rewatching the fifteenth season of Sanctuary Moon. It wasn't my favorite - that was why this was only my ninth rewatch - but it did have the storyline about Sparga Delfin's evil clone. Then Bharadwaj tripped my sensor array by tapping the camera nearest the lab door.
"Hey, wake up please," she said. I decided it wasn't worth explaining that, like all SecUnits, I never slept. "My cognition is slowing down," she said. "We may be going back to normal. We're three hours out from the wormhole, right on schedule." She yawned widely.
I recoupled my sensor array with my central processors and found that she was right. The bunk room cameras showed Ratthi carefully saving work he had scrawled onto four separate screens. I could see Pin-Lee in the common area standing and stretching like an adult human who had not moved in many hours. (A quick check of my cameras' memories showed that this was true: they had been hunched over that table since I had put myself into the maintenance unit, nearly eighteen hours earlier.)
Gurathin, who had been dozing in the co-pilot's chair, blinked and wiped his mouth. Mensah, who was still on the floor, stopped humming and sat up. "Whoops," she said.
I spoke through the public audio channel again. "We appear to be exiting the region of space in which your mental state was altered. We will be arriving at the wormhole in two hours and fifty-five minutes, and will exit the wormhole at WinNipi system in ten subjective minutes after that."
Back in the lab, Bharadwaj said, "Oh, drat. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Look at all this work we got done!"
I heard Arada's respiration hitch and her heart rate speed up.
"Dear heart, don't cry," said Bharadwaj. "I know it's a lot, but I'll handle responding to the peer reviews."
Arada sniffled. "That's not it," she said. "It's just - Pin-Lee and Ratthi and I ended our relationship, and I can see it was the only reasonable thing to do, I haven't forgotten figuring it out, but - "
Bharadwaj patted her shoulder. "It's still hard, I know" she said. "Let's get something to eat and clean ourselves up. Maybe even a nap. That will help."
A quick review of camera data for the past day revealed that they had both been in the lab without stopping to eat, sleep or bathe for approximately eighteen hours and twenty-three minutes. Judging by the line outside the shower cubicle, the rest of my clients were in a similar state. Turning up my olfactory sensors would have given me a more precise indication of their levels of well-being. I decided not to turn them up.
Forty-one minutes and twelve seconds later, all the humans had gathered in the common area, mostly clean. Bharadwaj spoke first. "I can remember everything that happened while we were in the zone of enhanced reasoning," she said. "What about you all, do you remember?"
"Zone of advanced reasoning?" asked Ratthi.
Gurathin appeared to be clenching his teeth together. "Enhanced reasoning," he said. "Oh, never mind. Call it the cloud."
"Fine," said Bharadwaj. "Do we all remember what we did when we were in the cloud?"
It seemed that all of them did, even Mensah. That was strange. In episode 3.12 of Medcenter Argala, nobody could remember their experiences in the cloud afterwards. I regretted that the cloud on the show and the cloud in Tkaronto System didn't work the same way. Now the humans were going to have to discuss it.
"Oh my," Mensah said. Clearly, she remembered the twirling and the humming and the looking at her hands. "This is all a bit embarrassing."
Pin-Lee gestured proudly at the main screen in the shuttle's common room. "Don't worry!" they said. "While I was - er - in an altered state, I anticipated this eventuality and drew up some documents to help us deal with the consequences. In fact I seem to have anticipated a lot of eventualities. There are forty-seven contracts here, plus supporting documentation. I organized them by probability of outcome. This one here is number three."
Bharadwaj looked at the screen carefully. "You want us all to sign a non-disclosure agreement about an orgy we just had?"
"Yes!" said Pin-Lee.
"But we didn't have an orgy," Gurathin said sadly.
"And if we had had an orgy," Mensah added, "why would we mind disclosing it?"
"Pin-Lee," I asked, "do you want me to scrub all the ship's internal logs for the last nineteen hours?"
"Exactly!" they said. "Or if you don't want to, maybe Gurathin can. It's really only eighteen hours and thirty-two minutes, though."
"Best to leave a margin," I told them. "And round numbers. It's less subtle that way."
"But - " said Ratthi.
"What? Why?" said Arada.
"Is that legal?" said Mensah.
There was a pause lasting a full seventeen seconds while Pin-Lee waited for them to figure it out.
"Oh, that's clever," said Bharadwaj.
"What's clever?" asked Ratthi.
Pin-Lee took pity on their teammates. "Look," they said. "We have to scrub the logs because they show us doing terrible things. Embarrassing things. Things that we should not have done. Breaking regulations and disregarding our own safety and the safety of our teammates. Overworking, neglecting self-care, skipping meals, engaging in solipsistic thinking, practicing poor sleep hygiene - you know the kind of trouble we would all be in if people back home found out. And the next team to use this shuttle would be sure to figure it out somehow."
Gurathin shuddered as he interjected, "There would be interventions, you know there would."
Bharadwaj added, "My spouses would be so disappointed in me."
Mensah said, grimly, "Work-life balance violations are very serious business ." Then she brightened as a new thought occurred to her. "As leader of this team, I'm responsible for all this! I could be asked to step down as Planetary Administrator."
Pin-Lee nodded solemnly at her, then continued, "So we have to get rid of the record. But we also have to give people a clue about what it is they're not seeing. As a distraction, do you see?"
"I get it!" said Arada. "We'll leave a copy of the non-disclosure document lying around in the shuttle files somewhere and people will assume we're just hiding an unauthorized orgy. No big deal."
"It's only a little bit illegal," Mensah said, reasonably. "And if I really didn't want the job, I could just quit."
4. Long after
Visiting Mensah at her home invariably caused difficulties. She was always surrounded by her spouses and children. Her children were at least grown adults, though not very interesting ones. But unfortunately they all had children of their own. Mensah's grandchildren were all small, fast, and mysteriously sticky. They enjoyed touching everything they could see, including me. There was one who cried whenever it saw me until I put my face shield down, and then they would laugh and demand that I do it again until I got bored and stopped (and then they would cry again.) There was one who liked to hold on to my knee joints with their sticky little human hands, and if reprimanded would switch to clutching at my ankles. It took, on average, 2.3 cleaning cycles to get my legs working properly again after each visit with Mensah and her awful family. I don't know why I kept returning whenever I found myself back in Preservation Alliance space.
Mensah had a very young grandchild who had already declared that they intended to become a caregiver and researcher specializing in human biology. My prediction module put the probability at well over 90% that this would lead to a career of sticky, fluid-based interactions with other humans. But the child's parents did not express disgust, so I withheld this information. This child's career plan led them to demand entertainments related to healthcare; that is how Mensah and I came to be sitting one day in the common area of her household, along with a number of her relatives, watching old episodes of Medcenter Argala.
As we neared the end of Medcenter Argala 's third season, I grew concerned. If Mensah recognized that I had made a statement of fact based on an early episode of an outdated entertainment rather than actual knowledge … My prediction module was spinning fast. That's a metaphor. In reality, it was just generating so many scenarios of social disaster that I couldn't process them all. No spinning was involved.
And then Mensah surprised me, by which I mean that she did something for which my prediction module had not yet generated a scenario. She informed the children that we would be jumping directly from Medcenter Argala episode 3.11 to the first episode of season four, skipping season three's grand finale.
"But Grandma!" said the stickiest grandchild.
"No," said Mensah firmly. "My friend and I have seen that one already. We saw it together, long ago. We don't need to see it again." And then she winked at me, and she giggled, and she wriggled her fingers in front of her face.
Behind my helmet, where nobody could see, I winked back.