“So, tell me about what it was like in Shipmind.”
“Well,” says Starille, “I know it was different for everyone, but I ended up going into medical with them to get scanned during the process. They wanted more data on what happened when someone was integrated, and I did too. While we were there, I ended up reading through some of their notes on the subject. Have you had the chance?”
It… hadn’t even occurred to me to ask. “Uh, no.” I’ve been a bit busy trying to find a way to escape, says the voice in the back of my head. I bite my tongue on that one, though.
“You might find it interesting, but it does get a bit technical. We- I added to it afterwards, of course, when I was integrated. I mean, it wasn’t just me, obviously… hell.”
“Gonna need some new pronouns just for engaging with Shipmind, huh?” I drawl.
“They’ve actually got the xenolinguistics bodies working on it, last I checked.”
I lean forward. “Okay, so how does that actually work? Shipmind is in every body, and Shipmind is a blend of everybody in it, but each body has their own expertise, somehow?”
Starille opens her mouth and holds up her hands like she’s about to start a speech, then stops, letting out a breath. She claps her hands together and leans her face down on them, her eyes tracking back and forth for the words she wants to say. Usually she only gets like this when she’s trying to explain some extremely nuanced programming thing to me, or when she thinks I’ve been exceptionally dumb and is looking for the right expletives. Her thumbs tap together a few times, and then she looks up at me.
“I think I’m gonna have to start at the beginning, and then you can ask me questions after. And… I think I’m gonna use we/us when I’m describing being inside Shipmind. It just feels wrong to do it the other way. Okay?”
I glare at the table, and my jaw tenses. “……Okay.”
“Right.” She takes a deep breath, and begins. “So, there I was, sitting on the med-slab, with this big jury-rigged machine sitting next to me, and Dr. Fritz staring at me. I was wondering when it would start, you know, and then I heard these… it sounded like when there’s a bunch of people in the next room over, speaking, but you can’t make out the words, you know?”
“Oh boy, creepy whispers right off the bat, huh.”
“I mean… yes and no. It sounded more like when you get to the cafeteria past lunch hour and you can hear everyone talking through the bulkhead. Like, they weren’t speaking at me, they were just talking. And shush, if I have to clarify every little thing we’ll be here forever.”
I shush.
“But, I keep getting more of these phantom sensations. At one point, I feel my leg itch, so without even thinking about it, I scratch it, except then I realize I haven’t moved. It’s kind of exciting!”
I raise an eyebrow at that.
“Come on, it’s a whole new mode of experience! Something I’d never done before! Maybe something completely unique to our ship, out here! This is the kind of thing I signed up for, exploring the unknown. How could I not be excited? But it’s at this point that things start to get disorienting. I blink, and I see myself, like looking in a mirror, and I realize I’m seeing through Dr. Fritz’s eyes. I smell spices and I feel a ladle in my hands. Water hits my skin as I take a shower, I’m lying down and standing up and sitting all at the same time, it’s all hitting me at once and it’s too much to keep track of.”
My eyebrows knit together, and I sit up straight. This sounds exactly like the symptoms James described. If the Erinyes Device was operating normally, then the next sensations would be nausea, vertigo, disorientation, and pain.
Starille continues. “But then, I feel it. And suddenly it’s not me anymore, it’s us. And instead of just me receiving all these physical sensations, it’s all of us together, managing and working and thinking and talking. We are Dr. Fritz and we’re reading the lines on the machine, and suddenly we understand all of the data. We feel the integration finish, and we feel joy and excitement that we’re together now! We look at the analysis machine, and we understand how it was constructed, and we remember the construction of it, all the little details we put together.” She takes a breath. “When I think about it now, I… don’t, anymore. I remember being able to understand it, but now that I’m not part of Shipmind, it’s gone.”
“What, they erased your memories when you left?”
She shakes her head. “No, not exactly. It’s just that when I was part of Shipmind, I had access to everyone’s memories and thoughts. I think they just weren’t copied over into my brain. Which makes sense; trying to simultaneously hold every memory from hundreds of people in your head all at once would probably be impossible. I suspect it’s like storing data on an external device, and then suddenly disconnecting that device from the network. The device will have sort of a random assortment of data, and it won’t have access to the information that was stored elsewhere.”
Despite myself, I smile. Trust Starille to make it all about computers. A thought pops into my head. “So, do you remember yelling at me?”
“You mean, when I shouted ‘we’re all still in here’? Yeah. I actually remember a lot of Shipmind’s interactions with you, whether I was present or not. We were relying on my knowledge of you to try to help you understand us, but you were so bent out of shape you wouldn’t listen.”
I fold my arms and avoid her gaze.
She sighs. “Right. So, I don’t remember everything. Big stuff, where Shipmind was really concentrating all of ourself onto one task, like when we tried to save James-”
“Oh, is that what you call that?” I side-eye her.
She glares back at me. “Yes, Sarah. We might not have succeeded, but we tried. I happen to think that matters. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Shipmind is perfect. Everybody makes mistakes. But we tried. And we kept trying, instead of just giving up. We put a lot of thought into how we should be doing things, how to handle the rest of the folks in the vents. We left supplies for you, you know, tried to leave them in places that didn’t look too conspicuous so you’d feel safe venturing out to get it.”
I think about how easy some of those runs had been. A sour feeling settles in my stomach. I had thought we were so clever, avoiding the patrols from the big bad hivemind. Did I actually accomplish anything by running?
“We ended up spending a lot of our time upholding the SFC charter: explore strange and unknown phenomenon, areas, and creatures. Shipmind is absolutely an unknown creature, even if it was us trying to understand ourselves. We wrote a lot of reports, although we haven’t sent them back yet.” She pauses. “As far as I know.”
“So you just sort of… got on with business?”
“More or less. We were working on your lockout codes, but we really hoped that we’d be able to convince you to just give them to us, once you’d had enough time to realize we weren’t a threat. We underestimated how stubborn you can be.” She gives me a wry look, then continues. “But, yeah. Most of our time was research, ship maintenance, and analysis. Just like always.”
My eyebrows knit together. “And this was the best thing that ever happened to you?”
“Yeah.” She pauses, opens her mouth, closes it, starts again, stops again, looks down at her hands, then back up at me. “I don’t know how to explain it. Being immersed like that, with almost all the people I care about in the world, and being able to feel how they care for me, too, and knowing that they can feel how I feel about them… it really was the best feeling in the world. It was just, comfortable. It’s not like my life was bad, before. I liked my job and I liked the people I did it with. But with Shipmind… it’s just on a totally different level.”
This is a lot to absorb. The best thing that ever happened to her wasn’t some kind of apotheosis or grand greater state of being, but just… doing research and being with the people she cared about? When you put it that way I feel… petty. “Geez. So, all that stuff about sex was just for teasing me, huh? I feel like an ass.”
Starille can’t meet my eyes, suddenly. And her face is turning a very pretty shade of pink.
“Starille? Were you not just teasing me?”
“W-Well, you have to understand, we were feeling pretty... affectionate towards ourselves, and, uh… p-part of our research was into how we processed emotions and sensations, so…”
“You had sex as part of a research project? I’d love to see the grant request for that one.”
She fiddles with the comms bracelet she’s got on. “Well… kind of? It’s not like we recruited ourselves into a formal study, or anything, but, you know, things happen, bodies get… excited, and we… made sure to observe and write down our results.” She turns to me, and her blush starts to recede as she gets enthusiastic about explaining. “It was fascinating, actually! Typically, sensations feel different when they’re applied to you by somebody else, rather than you trying to do them to yourself - you can’t tickle yourself, right? But Shipmind can! The sensations flow from every body involved, all at once - it can get pretty intense, if we focus on it.”
“Does that mean you can… not focus on it? While you’re doing it?” I pause. “Is that how you wrote down your results?”
She shrugs and half-smiles. “Hey, people think about other things during sex all the time, right? Why not Shipmind? It’s just that we can also do other things at the same time, with other bodies. Shipmind is…” She gestures in the air, summoning the word. “Big. There’s a lot of people in there! So, we can focus on many things at once, and the parts of us that aren’t interested can go do other things. And the parts of us that are, interested,” she blushes again, “but don’t have the, uh, experience they’d like, can… borrow it from other parts of ourself.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. “Well, hang on, why wouldn’t all of Shipmind’s bodies be equally interested and… uh, skilled?” Now I’m the one that can’t meet her gaze.
She drops her hands to the table. “W-well, one of the things we discovered is that although we could be in every body at once, and use any of our areas of expertise anywhere, it was easier to use them in the bodies that they came from. Preferences stay with the bodies they came from, too - something about the brain and the implant, I suspect. But we told you that already, I think.”
I shake myself and recover a bit. “You did, yeah. But, it still doesn’t make any sense to me. Is Shipmind a hivemind, or isn’t it?”
Starille takes a breath, claps her hands together, and lets it out slowly. “Shipmind isn’t… look, I don’t know what hivemind media you’ve seen, but I feel like hiveminds are totally different every time I see them. Shipmind isn’t homogeneous, it’s not the same at every point, but every part of them has access to every other part. We can jump into the Captain’s body and yell at you if we need to, and we can access all of our memories and expertise in one form, but that takes… effort is the wrong word. Concentration, maybe?” She pauses. “Like, if you and I here, having this conversation, are oil and water, then the thing you keep imagining Shipmind to be is like… mayonnaise.”
“Mayonnaise?”
“Sure, it’s an emulsion, so even though it’s made of different things, it’s been mixed so thoroughly that you can’t break it down into different parts anymore. But that’s not what Shipmind is. Instead, it’s like…” she waves her hands around again. “Chunky peanut butter?”
I stare at her.
“Okay, I’m bad at metaphors. But, you see where I’m going with this, right? Little chunks of things surrounded by a blend of all of them together.”
I keep staring.
Starille rubs her face. “Ugh. we were really certain I would be able to explain this well when I was still part of Shipmind. Not enough poetry transferred over from the Captain, I guess.”
“She writes poems?”
“Yeah. She never shared them with anybody, but we thought they were really good.”
I grumble at that. “See, that right there- isn’t that creepy? That breach of privacy?”
“We didn’t think so. And I don’t either. I’ve got stuff I’ve never told anyone, but Shipmind knows now. And it felt like confiding in… someone I loved. Someone who I trusted completely. And as long as I was a part of Shipmind, we knew we’d never betray that trust, because we were part of us, and you can’t betray your own trust. You see?”
I frown. “But you’re not part of Shipmind anymore.”
She looks away. “I know. That’s one of the reasons I got so worried about everything.” She looks back at me, her eyes shining. “But, I don’t think I needed to be! Talking to them again at lunch was… really nice. I still love them, and they still love me. We wouldn’t hurt each other.”
I cross my arms. “People who love each other hurt each other all the time.”
“I know. But… I trust them. If we hurt each other, it’s not because of malicious intent. We can work it out.”
It’s my turn to rub my face. It… makes sense, in a twisted way. If you join up with Shipmind, you become part of the collective. If you maintain some kind of… core, or something, of yourself, then you’re still present, and can advocate for yourself. And if you can advocate for yourself, and you are everyone, then nobody can betray you, because you’d be betraying yourself. Unless you leave, in which case, you wouldn’t be.
This is giving me a headache.
“I’m sorry,” says Starille. “I feel like I’m explaining this poorly. I just… when we were Shipmind, it all made sense. We could feel everybody, but we also were everybody. It was… pure trust, on the deepest level.” She looks at me. “Have you ever had someone you trusted, Sarah? I mean really trusted.”
“I trust you.”
She deflates a little. “Except you clearly don’t, because you don’t believe what I’m telling you.”
Ouch. Harsh, but fair. “Then… no. Not really. I don’t like to let people get that close.”
She blinks. “Why not?”
“Too much potential to get hurt.” I shift uncomfortably under her gaze. “It’s… happened once before.” I keep my eyes focused on the window. I don’t want to see her expression.
After a moment, I feel her fingertips brush mine across the table. I twitch… but I leave my hand there.
Her hand feels soft in mine as we watch the stars together for a while.
"You know", she says quietly, "maybe the best way I can describe being a part of Shipmind is like this. You always have someone willing to hold your hand."
I don't meet her gaze, but I don't let go, either. "But what if...” I hesitate. “What if I don't want someone to hold my hand all the time? What if I want to be free?"
I run my thumb over the back of her hand, and keep speaking to the stars. "You say you joined up to explore the unknown. I joined up because I wanted to be a pilot. Being at the controls of a ship means it's just me, in an endless sea of black. Maybe that sounds lonesome to some people, but to me, it's where I finally have the space to be myself."
Something drips onto my other arm, and I realize that I have tears slowly trickling down my cheek. I wipe at them with the back of my sleeve. "I just... I hate being penned in."
Starille shifts, but keeps her hand in mine. "So, all that time in the vents..."
The silence lingers for a moment before I respond. I wipe my eye again. "...Yeah. Not... my favorite. But better than the alternative. Better than being dragged down and pinned to a corkboard in somebody's collection."
Starille squeezes my hand. "That isn't going to happen. You know that now, right?"
Damn it all. I want to believe her, but that voice in the back of my head, the one thats kept me safe, it keeps going. It's a trick, a lie, she's being deceived, Shipmind will kill you and suck out your innards to replace you with itself, stay away, run for your life, run, RUN!
I squeeze my eyes shut and screw up my face so hard my ears start to ring. Between Starille with the evidence, the kindness, and my inner voice with the paranoia, who do I believe?
Starille's other hand clasps mine, too. "Hey. I don't think what you did was wrong, running away like that. Shipmind's early days were full of mistakes. We screwed up! And even if I'm not part of them right now, I want to apologize to you for making you so scared. I don't think we ever actually said it, so I will: we're sorry."
Take your hand back, run to medical, grab James, they won't stop you in time, get off the ship, flee! Starille's hands feel warm. I grip them a little tighter, and she squeezes back.
"What if..." Starille gazes at me, waiting for me to continue. "What if... I don't want to hold everyone's hand?" I look away from her. "What if I just want to hold one person?"
"Sarah..."
I take a breath, and pull my hand back. This isn't over yet. "There's something you don't know yet. About Shipmind."
