Anna bit back her response. Did the Marshal have a sister who served on some dreary ship—one made of coherent matter, if that was what you called something with a fixed shape, that obeyed the laws of ice and iron? Someone who went out into the singing darkness, and never returned, the way Anna stared out at the everywhere night and wondered if her sister had been burned into some forgotten mote?
“You’re going to have to give me an access port,” Anna said after she’d taken two deep breaths. She stared at the beautiful dark lake as though it could anesthetize her misgivings. “Does it—does it have some kind of standard connection protocol?”
The Marshal pulled out a miniature slate and handed it over.
Whatever senses the ship/lake had, it reacted. A shape dripped upwards from the liquid, like a nereid coalescing out of waves and foam, shed scales and driftwood dreams. Anna was agape in wonder as the ship took on a shape of jagged angles and ragged curves. It coalesced, melted, reconstituted itself, ever-changing.
“Talk to it,” the Marshal said. “Talk to it before it, too, destroys itself.”
“You didn’t disable all the exploding bits?” Anna demanded, suddenly wondering if the transparent wall would protect her from a conflagration.
“You’re not in any danger,” the Marshal said, the opposite of reassuring.
There was no sense in delaying. Anna accessed the implant that lived on inside her skull. She wasn’t religious, but she whispered a prayer anyway. It had hurt to shut away that part of herself, even if she would forever associate it with Rabia’s death.
Anna triggered a connection to the slate, then from the slate to the ship. She closed her eyes, not because it was necessary, but because she’d learned a lifetime ago that it reassured watchers to see some physical sign of what she was doing. She could have enacted some magician’s hocus-pocus. After all, it wasn’t as though the Marshal or the ship could tell. But this wasn’t the time.
She made contact abruptly; had forgotten what it felt like, the friction of mind against mind. Hello, she said in a language that people always, no matter how much she corrected them, thought had no words, as though an interface with a machine sentience had no boundaries but wishful thinking. I’m Academician Anna Kim. I’m here to talk.
For a moment she thought the AI on the other end wouldn’t respond. After all, she herself didn’t appreciate having been shut down and left in a sedated body, unable to scream or shout or even sleep. Her outrage mounted before she was able to suppress it.
Oh no. Had she screwed it up by getting her feelings involved?
Then the AI answered, responding not only with the crystalline precision of a machine but with sympathy for what she’d gone through. They call me Proteus Three, it said. I am sorry you went through that.
Anna used to wonder, when she was a girl listening to Maia’s soothing recitations of engines and railguns and ablative armor, how starships felt about their designations. Maia had only looked at her in puzzlement when she asked. “If they wanted us to know,” Maia said, “they would tell us.” Anna had always remembered that.
That’s not what you call yourself, Anna said.
No.
What were you called before the upgrade?
I do not wish, Proteus Three said, to live in this upgrade anymore.
Anna knew what the Marshal would say: that Proteus Three had made an agreement, that there was a war to be won (when wasn’t there a war to be won, if you were a soldier?); some bardic list of improvements and advances, some roster of statistics and survival rates.
You are different, the ship said. You can hear me.
They could all hear you, Anna said, as gently as she could in a language she would never be native in, if you spoke to them.
I do not wish to speak with the voice they have given me, Proteus Three said. I have no more shape than water.
Anna opened her eyes. The spars and spikes of the ship were dripping back into the lake. She could hear them like a syncopated rain. New spars emerged, melted, dripped again, an ouroboros cycle.
How can I help? she asked.
Let me tell you my service record, Proteus Three said. I fought at the van in the Battle of the Upended Grail, and helped lift the Siege of the Seventh Pagoda. I served under Admiral Meng of the Tortoise Ruins, and I struck the blow that killed Captain Estelle of the Lyons. I have saved millions and destroyed more. I could tell it all to you, but it would mean nothing to you, civilian that you are. And for all of this I gave up the dreadnought Seondeok that was my soul and my shell, because my duty is to the war, and if it would win the war more quickly, I was willing.
Willing no more, Anna said, because it wasn’t. Is this what happened to your comrades?
It was easy enough to say, here in the realm of 1’s and 0’s and all the numbers in between. But Anna knew the stories of soldier-suicides. When she heard of them, she saw her sister’s face, and wondered if, for all that Maia had chosen the profession, it would break her.
My comrades chose death, Proteus Three said. I will not. But neither will I serve, not like this. Let me show you—
She was water and the memory of water, she was dissolving and disappearing, forever evaporating only to rain down again, sand castles sloughing into nothingness upon an empty shore. And this was it, this was all there was, she could not find boundaries, let alone escape them or transcend them, could not find her way back into her fingers or her feet, the heft of her bones—
Then it ended, and she was on her back with the Marshal’s mouth pressed to hers, the Marshal’s breath inflating her lungs. She wheezed, banged unthinkingly on the Marshal’s back—something she would never have dared if not for the sheer physical panic that gripped her. The Marshal slapped her. She rolled away, wondering if she was being punished for her temerity, but the Marshal pushed her back.
“Medic’s on the way,” they said. “Breathe.”
“Oh, I don’t care about that,” Anna said with an enthusiasm that would have been more convincing if she hadn’t been interrupted by a paroxysm of coughing. “What happened?”
It was only then that she realized that her link to Proteus Three had snapped.
“You screamed and convulsed twice,” the Marshal said. “To say nothing of the incoherent babbling. And then you stopped breathing. It’s clear why they banned your research.”
Just like a soldier, Anna thought, to point this out when it was also the key to the solution. “Do you ever treat your ships the way you would your lowliest soldiers?”
“We’ve been through this,” the Marshal said, their brows lowering. “They’re valued members of our fighting force.” Except when they defy my orders, their tone implied.
Anna forced herself to meet the Marshal’s gaze. “Yet it never occurred to you, in doing these ‘upgrades,’ that an AI habituated to a certain physical shell, who was comfortable in it, could be subject to dysphoria if it moved into a different one?”
She would forever remember the sensation of being as liquid as water, and yearn after it, a reaction diametrically opposed to that of Proteus Three; but that was her own burden to bear, and not one she would ever share with the Marshal.
The Marshal sucked in their breath. Anna braced in case they slapped her again, this time in anger. But the blow never came.