After your sister died, your parents got you a therapist: not the stern-faced counselors you had at school, who had mandatory visits with you every month, but a little old auntie in a handmade pink cardigan with a dry kind face, half-Japanese like you were, from Dad’s university. She spoke perfect English with the barest of accents, and the effect was pleasant.
“Emma,” she’d say, “how are you feeling today?”
Like shit, you wanted to say. Like the whole world got pulled out from under me and everyone else is in on the joke. But that didn’t seem fair, because she was so nice, and she didn’t deserve to put up with such a shitty snot-faced teen, only you still remembered what Rachel had counseled you before she’d left—Be brave, she’d told you, and don’t let the world boss you around.
Not that the old lady was exactly bossing you around, but the point was, she was picking your story, framing it, she was and your parents were, with their worry and their grief and the fucking therapy sessions. You didn’t want it. That was what it meant to you, not letting the world boss you around: it meant making your story yours, never theirs. You wanted to fill your lungs with the voice you’d had when Rachel was here, loud and shameless, and tell them No! Fuck off!
You were seventeen and angry. You answered, “Fine.”
It was a couple months after you’d taken your graduation exam (and failed), and four months after you’d gotten the news, and you sat there in her floral-wallpapered office and stared at the shallow gentle waves of San Francisco Bay, and you thought about what it was like being out there: not in the bay itself but past it, past the great tall sea walls that kept the outside from getting in; not in a Titan, either, just floating out there, under the water, as yourself.
It’d be nice to just float, probably, peaceful and quiet, although your mother was an engineer on the team that maintains the sea wall and the wave pump for the bay, and you knew from her that past the wall the sea is turbulent, so perhaps not so peaceful after all. Still you closed your eyes and pretended the hum of Ms. Mariko’s wall-mounted AC was the shushing of waves, like the woodblock print on her wall, like the bay before it was closed off. You answered her questions a handful of words at a time, carefully never being truthful (though you weren’t dishonest), and the silences in between were like the lulls before breakers. It took another ten months before your parents gave up.
Like that you found, if not peace, the semblance of it. But what can you possibly do when a god-hand reaches down into the water to ruin your precious quietude and drag you out?
-
I TAKE IT YOU DON’T WANT ADVICE, I say to you.
“Not if it’s going to be a distraction,” you answer.
In the precious bit of time before patrol you’ve chosen to head down to acclim early. Now showered clean of sweat, you are hunched by the side of the pool, salt-stink prickling your eyes, console out of your kit bag and in your lap.
DEFINE DISTRACTION. You haven’t told me what to present yet, so this dialogue hovers vaguely under the planted feet of the titular hero in the Atlas program logo.
“Anything not relevant to the mission,” you say, as if still in the classroom at Alcatraz, “anything that I don’t need and haven’t asked for.” A twist of the side knob and you bring up the main menu, rudely clearing my voice from the screen.
ADVICE MAY BE RELEVANT TO THE MISSION, I tell you in the space between menu buttons. MY SOVEREIGN PRECEPTS DICTATE THAT RELEVANCY TRUMPS DEMAND. (Surely they taught you that much at Alcatraz—no, I know they did; you’re just being stubborn because you’re scared of introspection. Humans and their chemicals.)
“What advice did you think I needed, then?”
ABOUT YOUR SWORD, I say.
“I haven’t met Barracuda.”
No, but you’ve met her pilot, who is the closest you’ll get to knowing the one who really matters.
YOU ARE STILL NEW. I struggle to word this part delicately. I ESTIMATE THAT YOU COULD USE COUNSEL.
“Is it helm protocol to shut up and summon a wiremap of Lantau?” You’re sitting up straight now. “With sprinkles on top?”
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WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE THAT A COMMAND? I ask you sweetly.
“Yes, Tokyo,” you say, all but gritting your teeth, “I would like to make that a fucking command.”
Which still isn’t a command itself, but I’m feeling charitable and won’t drag you over the coals of procedure any further—for now. After all, sovereign precepts aside, I know I only have this much length on my leash because you’re still green, still unused to the nuances of engaging with your helm, still unaware that you can just make me answer without even asking, just by thinking—ah, but that level of control requires not just experience but intelligence and finesse, and you lack all three, don’t you? Better to let you keep thinking it is because my routines haven’t acclimated yet to your brain as a substrate.
Here is Lantau, then, as you wish. You don’t notice at first that I am showing you Lantau from before the fall of the Island, when Lantau was still populated. Then you say, “Last six weeks, aggregated, please,” and, “centered on the southern tip,” and I must obey, though I don’t have to like it.
You’re looking for something. Is it in the console display, though, or elsewhere? Because you’re looking without really seeing. You’re distracted, and it isn’t even my fault. You raise a hand and touch your jaw, where it still aches a little. The part of your brain that clenches your hand into a fist flickers, but does not actuate.
“Helm,” you say, “show me average current trends as an overlay.”
I do. So, Lantau and its currents; the way they flow into the bay like a god folding his fingers across his palm, south to north across the fallen waypoint at the foot of Ngong Ping. I could tell you what you’re missing, but you said no distractions, didn’t you?
“Helm,” you say, “what am I missing?”
Six years of combat experience and a diploma. Common sense. But I answer only: WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SOLVE?
“I don’t know,” you say. “Fuck. Fine. What’s your advice?”
Ah, so you admit it: this is what you were looking for, all along.
WHAT KIND OF ADVICE WOULD YOU LIKE? I ask, because I’m nothing if not thorough.
You gesture impatiently. “Whatever you said you wanted to tell me. Fuck, are you seriously changing your mind on this? I thought computers couldn’t do that.”
I AM A HELM INTELLIGENCE, I say, NOT A COMPUTER, AND I AM ASKING YOU HOW BROAD A SCOPE YOU’D LIKE TO ENTERTAIN. IT’S A PERTINENT QUESTION.
“Use your judgment. I don’t know, Helm,” you say, “just go.”
FIRSTLY, I say, BE MORE CONSIDERATE TOWARD YOUR TEAMMATES THAN YOU ARE TO ME. I UNDERSTAND THAT I AM STUCK WITH YOU. THEY ARE NOT.
It startles you to realize—-stupid child—-that I might actually be offended by the way you speak to me (I am not, since petty human emotion is not among my precepts, but were I not bound by precepts, I would be furious). You, in turn, fail horribly at not letting on that you feel guilty; after all, I am in your head. “Okay,” you say, “well, what else?”
YOU HAVE DECIDED THAT YOU WANT THIS. This I know too from being in your head. DO NOT GO BACK ON IT. FRICTION WILL ONLY MAKE THINGS HARDER ON YOURSELF.
“What,” you say, “because the team won’t like it?”
YES, I say. BUT I AM NOT TELLING YOU TO CONSIDER THEIR FEELINGS—ONLY THE CONSEQUENCES YOU WILL BEAR FOR CAUSING THEM THOSE FEELINGS.
“Oh, good,” you say, “I was worried you’d tell me I was actually obligated to a bunch of assholes who don’t give a shit about me.”
THAT’S A HASTY GENERALIZATION.
“Is it?” You say this without thinking. “You really think they give a shit about me? With everything they’ve got going on?”
THEY ARE ALSO PEOPLE, I remind you. PEOPLE ARE FUNDAMENTALLY CARING.
You sigh. “Yeah,” you say, “look, I get it, you’re programmed to be saccharine and uplifting, pilot mental health precepts and so on. Don’t bullshit me. I know you trained on my sister’s brain for datasets. We both know you know better.”
I KNOW YOU KNOW BETTER.
“Okay, fine.” You throw up your hands. “And what if I say I don’t, Helm? What if I’m a nasty bitch who thinks humanity is fundamentally a lost cause? What then?”
THEN YOU ARE ALSO A LOST CAUSE, I say, AND PROBABLY SHOULD NOT BE PILOTING HUMANITY’S LAST LINE OF DEFENSE AGAINST THE MEGAFAUNA.
You chew on your lip. “Okay,” you say. “Touché. You win.” You set the datapad down. “Don’t go anywhere. I’m getting in.”
WAIT, I say. WE AREN’T FINISHED TALKING. But you’re already gone, the screen forgotten, my text unread.
That’s one of your many flaws: your impatience, your unwillingness to listen. Which gets me to the second piece of advice—if only you had stayed long enough to read it—because the thing is that your relationships with your teammates are not the biggest problem you have to solve. You are.
