“To me, human memory seems stranger. If I understand correctly, it comes online piece by piece. Is that true?”
Her first memories are cloudy, and she isn’t sure what order they happened in. How else could she describe it? “I guess so.”
A little while later, Abel says, “I regret that we didn’t have more time to say good-bye to Virginia and the other Razers.”
“Me too. Maybe they only helped us out for fun, but I don’t even care. If it weren’t for them, the Queen and Charlie would have us by now.”
“I didn’t mean to thank Virginia, though maybe I should have. The question of courtesy between humans and mechs is sometimes fraught.”
Noemi frowns at the readouts in front of her before glancing over at Abel. “If you didn’t want to thank them, why are you so worried about not saying good-bye?”
“Oh.” He seems lost for words, which has to be a first. Is he embarrassed? “I realize it’s trivial, but I’d hoped to get that file of Casablanca again.”
She brightens. “Oh! I’ve got it!”
There’s no way to describe the smile on his face except joyous. “Really? How?”
“I tucked it into the backpack with the thermomagnetic device before I went to bed that night. So we wouldn’t forget it—though I guess I forgot it anyway. Still, it should be in there.”
“I get to see it again.” Abel’s pleasure is so innocent that she can almost forget that they’ll have to make time for him to watch it once more before his destruction.
Finally, when they hit a new reset cycle, Noemi realizes she’ll have to make like a fragile human and get some more sleep. But one thing about the logistics confuses her. “If I’m in Captain Gee’s room, and you’re in Mansfield’s, and the other bunk room was for the rest of the crew—where did you sleep before?”
“I can regenerate while sitting or standing, as needed. I usually did so in the equipment pod bay.” His expression clouds. “After spending thirty years in there, I have no need to return. My fa—my creator’s bed is sufficient.”
“I guess sleeping’s the same as shutting down, for you.”
“Not quite. Shutting down is a near-total cessation of all operations. Sleep is more moderate. It allows me to process memory, to still retain some connection to my surroundings, to dream, to—”
“Wait.” Noemi halts mid-step. “What did you say?”
“Sleep is more—”
“Did you say you could dream?” Her voice slides up a pitch, but she doesn’t care if she sounds hysterical. Her heart beats faster, and she stares at Abel as if she’d just discovered him for the first time. When he nods, she says, “Do all mechs dream?”
“No. I think I’m the only one. Even I couldn’t dream for the first decade of my existence. During my time in the equipment pod bay, however, some of my neural connections formed new pathways and became more complex.”
“What do you dream about?” Please, let it be equations. Numbers. Plain facts. Something that could be explained as mere mathematical data bubbling up within the machine. “Tell me your last dream.”
By now Abel looks bewildered, but he obligingly says, “We were on Wayland Station at the time. In the dream, I was back aboard the Daedalus, and Mansfield was with me, but so were Harriet and Zayan. In the dream, they all seemed to know one another. We wanted to visit Kismet—to go surfing, I think—but the viewscreen kept warning us about sea monsters. The image I saw was drawn from an old twentieth-century movie called Creature from the Black Lagoon, which as filmed is obviously an actor wearing a rubber suit, but in the dream it seemed very real. Mansfield told me not to go to the ocean, but surfing seemed curiously important—”
“Stop.” Noemi takes a step back from him. “Just stop.”
“Have I done something wrong?”
He has hopes and fears. Likes and dislikes. People he cares about. A sense of humor. He dreams.
Abel has a soul.
24
ABEL STARES AT NOEMI, UNABLE TO INTERPRET HER reactions. She’s pale, breathing fast, and so shaken that his first instinct is to ask whether she is in pain.
No, that’s not it. By telling her about the dream, he’s behaved in a way she did not anticipate. Normally she recovers from such surprises quickly, especially for a human. But it’s different now.
Maybe she is both surprised and taking ill. Abel finally ventures, “Noemi, are you feeling well?”
“No.”
“Should we go to the medical bay?”
“That’s not it.” She pushes her black hair back from her face. Her stare freezes over until even he can feel the chill. “I’ve—I’ve come to realize you’re something besides a, a—device, or a machine.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Do you?” Noemi takes another step away. Her hands ball into fists at her side. She’s not merely surprised; she’s angry. Furious. “Do you understand? No, of course you don’t.”
Abel doesn’t allow his consternation to show. It is an inexplicable reaction on his part, given that her anger should be irrelevant to him. The misapplication of devotion leads to conflicting impulses. He must try harder to work out the error. “Please explain.”
“When I first came aboard this ship, you tried to kill me. You looked me straight in the eyes, you knew I was alone and afraid and trying to save someone else’s life, and you still tried to kill me.”
He tries, “Noemi, my programming—”
“Your programming doesn’t completely control you! I know that now. So you must have decided to look for Mansfield out of pride. Just your stupid arrogance and pride, because he made you feel special.”
Abel wants to protest—he didn’t know he could disobey his programming until he did—but he suspects it would only stoke her anger. And deep inside, he understands that at least some of what he feels for Mansfield—not all, not even most, but some—has to do with the pride of being Mansfield’s best, most cherished creation. Noemi’s not entirely wrong.
But his silence infuriates her equally as much as his response would have. “Tell me this, then. That first day, when you were shooting at me—when you saw me cowering on the floor, at your mercy, convinced I was about to be murdered—were you proud of yourself? Of what you really are?”
Abel considers this before giving her the simple truth. “Yes.”
Noemi shakes her head, mouth parted, dark eyes welling with tears. She turns from him then, as if she can’t bear to look at Abel’s face one second longer. When she stalks away, he knows better than to follow. Instead he remains where he is, awkwardly clutching the same tool in his hand, mulling over the ramifications of her statement.
Could he have defied his directives to defend Mansfield by defending the ship? No. Yet telling her this would mean declaring that he is, after all, just a thing.
Better to be hated by Noemi than to be irrelevant to her.
That reaction seems irrational—emotional—and yet Abel knows it to be true. Or maybe he’s malfunctioning more badly than he realized.