Artemis

Even before she could open her eyes, Lieutenant Beverley Criss became aware she was conscious. Waking up on board Artemis wasn’t the pleasure it once was on Earth. The initial feeling, the sensation of floating wasn’t so bad, but it was quickly followed by the panic that she would suffocate trapped inside the artificial second skin of the medi-sac. She tugged at the internal toggle until the bag opened, releasing a hiss of air like a stale sigh as it did so.

She flopped to the ground where she gasped several deep breaths, her lungs desperately seeking to re-inflate themselves with oxygen.

Eventually, she cautiously opened her eyes. She’d been putting off this last part. Coming out of Cryo on these deep-exploration missions sucked. At best, it was like waking up with the worst hangover of your life. Now she’d opened them, her eyes still squinting and puffy, ached. It was to be expected she supposed when your body hasn’t used them for so long. Thankfully the effect was usually short-lived.

She scanned the row of five cryo-pods in the long-term communal crew chamber. Aside from hers, three of the others remained sealed, the lights above a steady green. Only the far pod, number 5, was active. The pod cracked open and like some grotesque chrysalis, Jamieson, the ship’s Intel officer and only civilian crewmember, emerged and he too flopped to the floor on his back emitting a low groan.

Something was wrong. This much was obvious immediately by the fact the chamber was bathed in pulsing orange light. It was also obvious by the fact Artemis hadn’t woken all of them, as it would have if they’d reached their intended destination deep in the N7 region. But the fact that the ship had only woken herself and Jamieson also suggested it wasn’t a disaster either. If there was a problem, the ship’s AI was designed to only utilise the human resources it required. Lieutenant Criss hoped it was the latter. Occasionally small things went wrong. A faulty reading from a sensor, or shortfall in resources required to sustain life on board, which meant an adjustment was necessary to the materials fabrication unit.

By now, though nursing a throbbing headache, not helped at all by the pulsing glow of the orange alert light, Lieutenant Criss was fully awake. She stepped along the narrow steel gantry to where Jamieson was now crouched, rubbing his eyes, and she extended a hand.

Squinting against the light he took it and she dragged him to his feet. He looked past her shoulder.

“It’s just us?”

She nodded. “The Captain, Jackson, and Hodge are all still under. Pods all status green – I checked already while you were coming around. Let’s get to the C-Deck and see what’s going on.”

The first thing she wanted to check was their location and how long they’d been under.

The two of them exited the crew quarters, ducking their heads and negotiating the narrow crawlspace to the climbing well between decks. There were no neon lights or floor to ceiling windows with a vista of the galaxies outside here. While Artemis herself may have been gargantuan, millions of tons of gleaming metal skin, in the name of efficiency scant additional space was allocated for the comfort of the ship’s minimal crew.

Jamieson followed Criss into the climbing well, twisting into the space where hundreds of steel hand and footholds marked the separation between decks. Lieutenant Criss looked up above her at the rungs rising into the distance. This would be a daunting task for limbs which were still stiff and returning to life. Fortunately, Artemis’ internal power systems still appeared to be intact, and with a swipe of the illuminated control pad beside her, the automated ladder system began to quietly glide them, ascending toward the command deck.

Reaching C-deck Lieutenant Criss followed another gantry, ducking between two giant columns of cables tethered either side of the bulkhead, before settling herself into position in the cramped space of the cockpit. She tapped her passcode into the touch-screen panel in front of her and the electronic display burst into life.

WELCOME BACK LIEUTENANT CRISS. IT’S NICE TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOU AGAIN.

She smiled. Even in what could potentially be an emergency, the ship still felt like a familiar friendly giant, wrapping itself around them, protecting and keeping them safe.

Jamieson slipped into the chair to her right, pulling the straps of the Kevlar harness over his shoulders.

“Do you ever think Artemis knows we’re here?” She asked.

“Of course it knows we’re here. How else do you think it knows to wake us up?”

“No, I mean…you know, do you think it thinks about us?”

“Are you asking me if the ship has feelings? It’s a machine, Bev. It doesn’t think, at least not like that. This AI is state of the art, capable of making decisions far faster and far more complex than any human being can, but at the end of the day, it’s just a collection of algorithms. It might seem like it, but it’s not thinking, and it’s definitely not feeling anything.”

Jamieson was probably right. That was all it was. AI. Artemis was a Leviathan-class mining ship. Fifth-generation. State of the art. By now the AI in these ships had become so advanced the algorithms themselves controlled the construction of each new Leviathan-class monster. AI which was now far more capable of design, at a level of intricacy, than any human could achieve. Ships replicating themselves in ever more complex ways. Despite their assurances to the contrary Criss sometimes wondered whether the executives at the huge tech conglomerates that sold these fifth-generation deep-space explorers even knew themselves how the AI worked anymore. At what point had human beings crossed the point of being dependent on AI, rather than the other way around? It was a discomforting thought when you were farther away from home than any human had ever been. Instead, she preferred to think that Artemis did indeed feel them inside and was driven by its own desire, no matter how foreign, to nurture and protect them.

“Status?” Jamieson interrupted her thoughts.

Criss scanned the steady stream of data scrolling across the screen in front of her. There was nothing obviously out of the ordinary, which begged the question as to why Artemis had woken them, and why even now, they were bathed in the intermittent orange glow of the alert lighting.

“Nothing external registering in our immediate vicinity. No breach. Life support systems all reporting normal. Intel?”

“Looking now,” he said. “Hmm.”

“Hmm?”

“I’m getting some error messages on one of the cores.”

The cores were part of the system of processing units that made up Artemis’s artificial intelligence. In all, there were over a thousand such processors distributed all over the ship, each monitoring its environments, reporting data, and continually making millions of calculations and tiny adjustments. Together they were Artemis’s central nervous system.

“How many?”

“Just the one as far as I can tell. Core 663. Location, on R-Deck. It seems to be looping. That could explain why Artemis woke us up.”

“Can you restart it?”

“I’m trying now, but it looks like each time it starts to come up, it hits some kind of error then times out.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, I think I’m going to have to go down to R-Deck and see if I can fix it manually.” Jamieson popped a hatch in the console beside him and rummaged around until he found a small set of tools. She stifled a laugh.

“What?”

“Five generations of the greatest AI ever developed and it still relies on a guy with a screwdriver to replace a faulty part?”

“Whatever. I’m going down to R-deck. You just stay here and let me know if anything changes.”

Jamieson slipped out of his harness and clambered back through the bundles of cabling hanging from the bulkhead door.

Abandoned by Jamieson, sitting in the silence staring out at the cold darkness of space, Lieutenant Criss felt suddenly very alone. She tapped at the panel in front of her. There was no further clue as to why Artemis had woken them, beyond the fault Jamieson had gone to investigate with a minor subsystem. Hardly a problem worth rousing both of them.

She wondered whether it was possible that a huge artificially intelligent structure such as Artemis could get lonely. Perhaps, she considered, the ship wasn’t aware of their existence. Not in the sense she had posited earlier, but maybe there was a deeper relationship between them than just an AI being tended to occasionally by a small human crew. Otherwise, it made no sense. If the AI was so advanced, why did it need a crew at all? They’d spent the majority of time on board in suspended animation, so what value did they add?

She dismissed the idea and, having found nothing of interest in the vicinity went to the bathroom. Despite being asleep for the last twenty months, now suddenly her body had the very real urge to relieve itself. When she returned to her post in the command section she had the feeling the interior was now warmer as if the internal systems were only now starting to reach full status. Even her board seemed to glow slightly brighter.

That was when it dawned on her. Maybe the need to be periodically woken to perform mundane maintenance was simply a distraction. A ruse generated by Artemis’ AI itself, to a deeper function they performed without even knowing it? What if Artemis and her crew had a symbiotic relationship? Artemis may be no more aware of their thoughts and feelings than they were aware of the bacteria in their own gut, but buried deep inside of her, perhaps they performed a similar critical function. What if their very being awake provided some essential service on which the ship itself depended, for which in return, she provided them with protection and shelter from the abyss beyond?

There was a blip on the screen. Far off, but nevertheless, there was something out there, and Artemis was approaching it.

“Jamieson?” There was no answer.

“Intel, status?” She could hear the slight tremor in her voice, this time. Where was Jamieson?

“Sorry,” he replied eventually in her earpiece. “Problem with my comms. Sorted now. I’m almost at the faulty core.”

“Ok, but I think you’d better check it out then get back up here.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I think I’ve…I think Artemis found something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, it’s still too far away, but I think we’ll know in a couple more minutes. How long do you need on that core?”

“Just a couple of…what the hell?”

“Jamieson? What is it?”

“It’s the core. It’s leaking some kind of fluid.” Jamieson laughed. “Well I’ll be damned.”

“What is it?” Criss repeated.

“If I didn’t know any better, it almost looks as if it’s crying.”

“I thought you were the tech expert? Now who’s trying to say the ship has feelings?”

“No, it’s just I’ve never seen this kind of problem before. I’m just going to have to shut it down, that’s all.”

Suddenly the ship lurched. The orange pulsing of the internal warning system ceased completely and the interior was plunged into darkness. Lieutenant Criss tightened the straps around her shoulders. In the cold dark of the cockpit all she could hear was the sound of her own breath.

Seconds later the normal internal lighting came back on. Thankfully the orange pulsing had stopped.

“Jamieson? Was that you? Did you restart the core?”

“Negative. Besides, there’s hundreds of cores all around the ship. Shutting down one alone shouldn’t cause that to happen. You got anything more on that object?”

Lieutenant Criss strained her eyes against the blackness of deep space. Then she caught the glint of something. An irregular patch of shadow against the background carpet of stars.

“I think I’ve got visual. Going to try and throw some light on it. What’s happening on Intel?”

“Rebooting the core now.”

Criss tapped at the control panel in front of her and Artemis threw out a beam of light in the direction of the shadow.

That’s when she saw it.

It was little more than a shell. The old hulk of a ship.

A shudder ran through the hull. At first, Criss thought she might be imagining it until Jamieson’s voice echoed in her earpiece.

“What was that?”

But all she could hear was the echo of Jamieson’s earlier words. ‘If I didn’t know any better, it almost looks like its crying.’

Under the spotlight in the deep void of space, in front of her drifted the hulking body of a generation four Leviathan. The hull shuddered again and for a brief moment, the internal lights flickered.

Is this what Artemis had woken them for? Is it possible the AI was grieving one of its own?

***