I bring Starille back to my quarters, and proceed to lock it down again. Anything I’d reconnected goes dark. My looping video? Gone. Starille’s comms bracelet? Deactivated. No network connections here. I don’t want Shipmind to even get a hint of what we’re going to be talking about.
Starille watches me with increasing concern. “Sarah, what on Earth-”
I put a finger to my lips, then finish disconnecting the network cable from the wall terminal. “There. Shipmind can’t see anything in this room, now.”
“Sarah, they’re not spying on you or me. What is all of this?”
I head for the shelf I stored James’s datapad on. “The thing is, I don’t think Shipmind even necessarily knows this about Shipmind. But that’s what makes it so dangerous.” I grab the pad and hand it to Starille.
“Is this… James’s personal pad? Why do you have this?”
I busy myself unlocking my password storage so I don’t have to answer. “Here,” I say, spinning my pad around. “Enter this in the ‘Old Math Shit’ folder.”
Starille taps on the screen and begins to read. I watch as her face goes from concerned, to pale, to slightly green. “Sarah, this is… horrible. I can’t believe James went through this. These symptoms…”
“Are almost exactly what you described feeling when you were being brought in to Shipmind?”
Her eyes flicker back and forth between my face and the pad. “That’s not… what? What are you saying?”
“Keep reading,” I say, my face grim.
She pages through documents. I have to start pacing back and forth, or I’ll go nuts waiting. I keep coming back to the question: what happened? It seems obvious to me that the Erinyes device was uploaded to the central computer, just like I meant to do to Shipmind. But somewhere along the way it got altered. Who uploaded it? How and why was it changed? And most importantly: Where is the secret trigger that will blow the whole thing apart? Starille’s adamant that Shipmind isn’t harmful to the people it’s absorbed, and…
And…
She’s not right. She can’t be. Shipmind is dangerous, says the voice in the back of my head.
But what if she is right? Says a new voice. I pause in my pacing, facing the wall, thoughts pinballing around in my head.
Well… regardless of whether I agree with her or not, if the whole thing was designed as a weapon, then it’s harmful whether or not it seems okay to the people inside of it.
There’s a crash as the datapad drops to the table, and I spin to look at Starille; the visualization of the Erinyes Device spins on the screen. “There!” I shout. “See?”
She shakes her head, speechless. “Wh- you- I- this can’t-”
“This is exactly the same as the visualization of Shipmind! The code architecture’s completely identical!”
The visualizer shows the data moving around sluggishly, a dark plague green instead of Shipmind’s luminous gold. It… it is the same. All the important parts are there. The color’s probably not that important.
Right? Right.
“Sarah, this is- it’s- it’s totally different.” She doesn’t sound quite convinced herself. She pulls the datapad back and frantically pokes at the files, rotating the visualizer around this way and that, looking for answers. “If I could just pull up the main computer’s database too, I could run a comparison-”
“Whoa, hey, no way! There’s no telling how Shipmind will react to this. There might be some secret kill switch in there that we don’t know about, or something.” That sounds plausible, anyway.
Starille bites her lip. “I want to tell you that’s ridiculous, but…”
I stop dead. “Wait, really? You’re not going to tell me that’s not how computers work?”
“None of this is how anything works!” She runs a hand through her hair and gets it caught in a tangle. “The implant can’t be used to control the brain like this. This file never got onto the main computer. And there was nothing in Shipmind’s memory about this Erinyes Device, or I would have noticed it when I was working with the core! And yet…”
The silence sits between us for a moment. Eventually, I’m the one that breaks it. “What do you mean, this file never got onto the main computer? I thought you said that the database contained every file on the ship. Shouldn’t it have been there already?”
Starille takes a breath and steadies herself. “Right. There’s a difference between the database and the computer processor, especially when it comes to personal data. The database has backups of everything on every personal pad, but you can’t just order the computer to access that data. It’d be a huge breach of privacy. So there’s,” she frowns, thinking about what to say next, “sort of two databases. One the computer can see and execute, and one it can’t. This file never made it to the actual executable computer core.”
I blink at her. “How do you know?”
She flips through the menus for a moment and pulls up some kind of log file. “See this? This is the log of all files transferred between this pad and the main computer.”
I peer at it. It’s essentially blank. “Well… couldn’t it have been erased?”
She pokes at the datapad, executing some complicated debug command I can’t follow. The pad beeps, then pops out of the log menus back to the Erinyes files. “No dice. There’s no evidence of any tampering with the logs. See? It doesn’t make any sense. Unless…”
“Unless? Unless what?”
Starille taps her finger against her inactive comms bracelet. “I don’t want to admit it, but… no, there has to be some explanation for this. I can’t believe anybody on the ship would want to do this,” she pushes the pad away from her, “on purpose to our crew.” Her eyes dart away from mine, and the tempo of her tapping increases.
I frown. “Starille? What aren’t you telling me?”
She avoids my gaze for another second, then grabs her wrist, pinching at the skin. “I told you before that Shipmind can’t hide things from parts of themself.”
She pauses. When she’s not more forthcoming, I prompt her. “Yeah?”
“That’s not… I mean, it is true, but it’s not the whole truth.”
I wait, and she fidgets. Come on, just tell me. If you just admit that Shipmind isn’t on the level, we can leave and we’ll all be safe!
“The truth is… I’ve been worried about this. I don’t have any proof. But there is one way that Shipmind could hide something.”
I lean forward, hands on the table.
“Shipmind could delete their own memories.”
