Those Who Knew Earth: Revolution, Part 1

We return to the ship after a 25 year timeskip. Before, Captain Phillip reset John, the Overseer AI who launched the ship, in the hopes of having Wei imprint on it. Instead, his grandaughter Jewel did so, and now runs the small community in partnership with a digital copy of herself.

This is the 5th chapter of the serial. Want a full recap? Check here, or here’s the index.

This is chapter 5 of a serial about a generation ship. This chapter takes place 75 years into the journey.

The main characters are:

Jewel, the 50 year old captain, who merged with the ship AI 25 years ago.

Sun, 49 years old, seems to have had his youthful rebellion squashed but retains a valuable spark of defiance.

Isaac, 31, is caught in the middle as Jewel’s son-in-law and Sun’s nephew.

While the passengers of the first interplanetary ship slept, an AI copy of a young woman flitted about in their heads. It danced in and out of their brains through the Cyonic cybernetics they wore as easily it did the life support monitors or telemetry readouts, looking for signs of insubordination or indolence. Because that’s what Jewel would do.

Jewel, meanwhile, slept fitfully, wracked by dreams informed by this intrusive analysis. The AI she’d imprinted on in an impulsive act twenty five years ago dwelt securely in her mind as well as the ship’s computers, using her brain to eek out more processing power.1 She saw this as a sacrifice. And as an honor; a way to contribute to the smooth running of the most important voyage in history.2 That it allowed her to act as absolute despot? That was an undeniable perk. But one she paid for in nightmares such as this.

The dining hall was warped by a sleeping mind to exaggerated proportions, but her attention was drawn to a stream of angry passengers venting their fears at her. Despite the fact that I’m keeping this fragile, precious bit of archaic tech running in the midst of the cold expanse, she thought.

“You’ve doomed us all, child.” There was sweat on Aisha’s brow as she uttered the words.

Jewel knew it wasn’t mere nerves causing the older woman to sweat. Environmental controls malfunctioning, she was informed by her digital half. Likewise, she knew the emotion driving Aisha was cold contempt, contempt Jewel inherited from her predecessor.3

“Cut the drama. We’ll fix the heat.” Jewel tried to come off nonchalant, but she was sweating profusely.

“Will you? Or will you just make us forget about it while we slowly roast to death?” This from Sun, sitting with arms folded across a soaking nightshirt. Others gathered in the meeting murmured similar doubts.

“Of course we will. I’ve got the heating schematics indexed now. It’s probably a faulty sensor, or else fused wires in the controller. I’ll need three people to take an extra work detail.”

“Look, another excuse to push people around,” called another angry voice.

“You think I want this?” Jewel motioned toward her daughter Angel, cradling young Aether. “My grandchildren are dying from the heat.” She was shocked to hear herself say that; she hadn’t realized it until that moment.

Her grandfather Phillip, whom she had usurped, towered over her impossibly, and shook his head sadly. “You’re killing them, Jewel.” More ghosts loomed behind him, more deaths they’d blamed on her.

“Please, peace,” interjected Nicole, rousing her ancient body and holding out her hands to calm the crowd. “Everything will be fine.” She turned to Jewel, gazing calmly through her. “We just need to throw her out of the ship.”4 A hundred hands reached for Jewel, too many to stop even with the ability to shut down their movement one by one.

She awoke in a sweat in her room. Sweat from the nightmare, but it was indeed warm. At a thought, she commanded the ship to run diagnostics on all environmental systems, controls, heating, and cooling. The response came immediately, along with the knowledge that it had already performed this check a moment ago, prompted by her unconscious mind. She sighed. Even after twenty-five years, the AI still attended to her sleeping whims. She ran through the Cyonics logs with a queasy feeling — sure enough, it had been using the sleeping crewmembers to run a simulation based on her unconscious fears, feeding the results back into her nightmare.

“Stop that,” she berated the AI. “People’s reactions while dreaming are unreliable indicators of future behavior.”

“Disagree. Records show remarkable fidelity between dream actions and subconscious desires while waking.” Just who was in control was sometimes unclear. But she and the AI were usually able to come to accord, given that the program once reset had imprinted itself through a torrent of mental interrogation. Not only that, it had free access to her thoughts and permission to use her mind as excess RAM. Control was not the only blurry line; so was identity.

“Still, it’s… too much noise to be actionable information. Even more when it’s jumbled up with my own worries.” She shook her head, the image of her long-dead grandfather angrily judging her slow to recede. Then she recalled the end of the dream. “Shit, does that mean we’ve lost Nicole?”

“We ran the simulation through her dreams; that was her response.” A pause, then, “But as you say, it’s not perfectly reliable. Some tend to act more on impulses, while others can be more conflicted. I’ve found the former to be easier to predict via Cyonics.”

“Let’s wipe that dream from the crew’s memory,” Jewel muttered, shuddering at the recollection of the exaggerated faces. “Those might be their inclinations but no need to make it explicit.”

“Already done,” her digital half responded.

“But no other changes!”

“Acknowledged.”

She sat up on the edge of the bed. A solitary room was the one indulgence she’d granted herself. The children’s beds in the cabin were empty, her children having moved out not long ago. As had Charles. She gazed longingly at the empty space there next to her. It had been cramped with the two of them; somehow it was an expanse now that she occupied it herself. It hurt, still, but she had to admit there was a bit of pride in their separation. He had left their berth only reluctantly and after her insistence.

“Why, Jewel? I’m on your side, you know that.” Frustration showed on his face clearly in the memory she unintentionally called up. He’d never hidden things from her, even before the crew learned the futility of even trying.

“I don’t doubt your love. I just… you need to leave. I need space. Please.”

“You need to be accountable to someone.”

“Perhaps, but I’m not, and I can’t be. Just trust me. We can speak during the day or via Cyonics.”

He’d shaken his head, stepped in closer and put his hands on her shoulders. Leaned close to her ear. “Speaking is not all we do at night, lover. Don’t you need me?” Are you so much a machine you don’t need my affections? She’d heard the thought, but couldn’t hold it against him when she wondered that herself.

“The arrangements have been made.”

“This will set a bad example. People will talk.”

“I won’t let them.”

He had no response to that assertion of power. Without another word he left, still her husband, but no longer her bunk-mate. It would have saved some hurt feelings all around to tell him that she feared a moment of her own weakness at night. That she would reach out in her sleep or in a moment of intimacy and mold his mind. He would have insisted on the right to take that risk, and she didn’t want to hurt him more by denying that, as well. I may have made him stop loving me but I only did it so I wouldn’t accidentally force him to. It had made sense at the time.

Now, breaking the memory, her artificial counterpart spoke. “If you told me to refrain from accessing Charles Cyonics’ unbidden —”

“Then such a command would hold — until I accidentally countermanded it. It’s for the best. Besides, I have enough to keep busy. Let’s get started on the day.” She opened the shallow drawer below the bed and pulled out a shirt and pants, her fingers getting caught in the holes as she pulled it on. She gave a grunt of disapproval. “Starting with whoever was on mending duty last wash cycle.”

Next time we see how the crew is faring under her metaphorical but forceful thumb, including no longer baby Isaac.