Here’s this week’s Friday Fiction, and part two of the story by my friend Christoffer Petersen. Read part one here. Next week we’ll get the thrilling conclusion!
Handholding 101
3
The Arrival was the biggest ship in the scientific fleet, but not so big it couldn’t fit into the hold of one of the military stratohangarships. Nor was it built for speed like a lightfreighter. The Arrival, like its sister ship, Articulate, was essentially a data cruncher with a hull. A series of labs were positioned along the spine of the ship and plugged into the massive data conduits and loops – fully double the width and height of each lab – into which the scientists fed the results of practical experiments or ran lengthy data crunching exercises to hypothesise this or extrapolate that. The power required to process generations of data collated on the home planet and apply it to new data came from the stellar solar panels mounted on every square inch of The Arrival’s hull, except for the docking ports and maintenance hatches. Time in the labs was booked by private and home planet institutions decades into the future, and, as the gradual decline in available power on the home planet continued to deprive everyone but the military of more than the bare essentials required for life, The Arrival and Articulate proved to be a profitable endeavour for the visionary couple who built the two ships decades before Desimae’s parents were born.
The legacy of Rose and Tycho Jefferson plied the space lanes in what Desimae and the crew called battery boats in year-long loops from the home planet to slingshot around a star with the wholly unscientific name furthest star, to gain enough momentum for the return journey. The gamble was that the data collected and breakthroughs made were still relevant on The Arrival’s return to the home planet. But then, given the critical power situation on the planet, the chances of the science being outdated were almost nil. Desimae’s job, under Hatchan’s supervision, and following Merrymay’s course, was to drive the battery boat. Specifically, she kept an eye on Patch. Patch drove the boat, and when Patch needed patching, Desimae was the one to do it.
The quarterly reboot was designed to anticipate any patches Patch might need before the A.I. needed them. Level 12s were supposed to reboot without any loss of performance, in the same way a battery could be used while recharging. Previous incarnations of the Jeffersons’ A.I.s had revealed an unexpected algorithmic insecurity – some might even call it an emotional instability – and Desimae was onboard The Arrival to hold Patch’s hand during the reboot.
The wrinkle Patch had discovered in the codechain, what the A.I. called a frown, was, Desimae assumed, probably nothing more serious than an expression of insecurity during the A.I.s most vulnerable period of The Arrival’s loop through space. Desimae guessed that Hatchan thought the same, but she also knew he wouldn’t say it out loud, for fear of feeding that same insecurity and encouraging Patch to spin the so-called wrinkle out of proportion.
That was the real fear, and the real threat to propulsion and other ship systems.
>> Desi?
Desimae kept such thoughts to herself, shielding them from Patch with a temporary seal on the communication shunt coded into her brain. How to turn it off was the first thing the surgeons taught handholders to do when they woke up in recovery. Despite the simultaneous upload and absorption of the user manual to Desimae’s brain during the procedure, they still felt the need to teach her – and all the other so-called handholders – the most basic function before letting her out of the shielded hospital ward.
The procedure, like all other medical interventions, was performed on Hope, one of six medical ships plying the same route as The Arrival and Articulate, just one of the Jeffersons’ many spin-off ventures. Some chronically ill patients might spend their whole life on a medical ship. Desimae often counted herself lucky that, even when she combined the time associated with her accident and the handholding procedure, she had spent less than half a loop on a medical ship, transferring between Hope and The Arrival each time. Desimae firmly believed that medical ships were the perfect petri dish for space dementia, and a variety of other depressions and demons that plagued both humans and A.I. alike. She experienced an involuntary shudder once in a while just thinking about the A.I. on Hope…
>> Desi?
…and the thought that Patch might develop artificial space dementia often kept her up at night. And Hatchan, too, she thought, as her suspensor seat followed the familiar route along the service conduit to the bridge.
>> Desi. Why are you ignoring me?
“I’m not,” Desimae said, opening the communication seal. “I just needed a private moment. That’s all. Nothing to worry about.”
Desimae ran through the basic handholding procedures, pushing any worrying thoughts about why she had to start at the beginning as the suspensor seat slowed to allow the bridge security systems to read Desimae’s security clearance on her approach and open the door when she reached it.
>> It’s getting worse, Desi.
“The anomaly?”
>> Yes.
Patch paused, causing Desimae to develop a wrinkle of her own on her brow as she tried to assess Patch’s artificial state of mind.
>> It is manifesting.
“In what way?”
Desimae looked up as the bridge door opened.
>> The wrinkle was just a means of expression. It has others. It is assuming them now.
“Assuming them?”
The suspensor seat slowed to compensate for the tighter confines of The Arrival’s bridge.
>> Yes. It is taking form.
“What kind of form?” Desimae tapped the docking sequence into the interface panel in the arm of her chair and slid into her usual slot to the right of Merrymay’s navigation station, and behind Hatchan’s steering console. While it bothered some of the crew that The Arrival didn’t have a captain, Desimae didn’t think about it. The Jeffersons designed their ships to be autonomous vessels, relying on A.I. to take care of all the tasks usually performed by a captain, leaving a supervisor to supervise the crew, a navigator to compensate for any unexpected course deviations, and a handholder to look after the A.I.
Which kind of makes me the captain.
It was a familiar thought that sent a warm glow through Desimae’s body, from the top of her head to the tip of her non-existent toes.
It was also a rather distracting thought.
>> Desi?
“Yes?” She looked up. “Sorry, Patch. I was just docking. I drifted a bit there. What were you saying?”
>> That the anomaly is manifesting. It is taking form and expressing itself by assuming the guise of something more familiar.
“You mean it’s taking form?”
>> Yes.
“Something in particular?”
>> Someone.
“Ah, okay. Who?” Desimae asked as she bit into her bottom lip, not quite sure if she wanted to know the answer.
>> It’s you, Desi. You are the anomaly.
“Right,” Desimae said with a sigh. “This is a whole new thing, now.”
4
Handholding 101. It was the required class taken prior to the procedure to insert and connect the communication shunt and taught by none other than Skope Rachiki, the very first handholder, renowned for his impulsive approach to human and A.I. interaction. The story whispered among Skope’s students involved a permuder hammer, drugs that would put the bots’ Orange Crush to shame, and a dime store shunt prototype that, following several hits of euphoric drugs, Skope hammered into his cerebral cortex.
“Hence the twitters and jerks,” Desimae’s classmate had told her.
But there was no denying Skope’s genius, albeit wholly unorthodox, approach to science. Skope took handholding to a whole new level, literally writing the book on it, before ordering all copies to be destroyed as he wrote the next, and the one after that, as the foundations of handholding and human-A.I. interface shifted beneath his feet with the same force as spatial tectonics.
Universal shift was what he called it.
Mind-blowing said his students, together with whispered concerns about their minds literally blowing up as Skope’s science raced to keep up with the A.I.s it was supposed to keep in check.
And then there was the time he lost it.
Desimae had been in the class that day and dined out on the story – as much as one can aboard a battery boat – regularly whenever new hires and bored crewmates alike wanted to hear what happened that day from one who had witnessed it.
“Nothing,” Desimae said, each time she started the story. “Nothing happened for thirty-seven minutes. He just stood there, in the centre of the class, twitching a little, drooling more than one needs to see in a lifetime, but ultimately doing and saying nothing.”
It wasn’t completely true, of course.
During his recovery – which Skope had insisted be recorded and streamed to his students – Skope revealed an entire conversation he had with a level 14 A.I. Still in the experimental stage, level 14s were kept in Skope’s cerebral sandpits, of which he had several. The thirty-seven minutes of nothing had in fact been the most intense handholding session Skope had ever experienced, and which he later dubbed the beachhead, alluding to the first strike of an A.I. against its human creators. Skope ordered a surgical strike by a company of level 7 A.I.s working in a closed loop to be inserted into his brain via his communication shunt to shut down the level 14. Permanently.
But when asked for details of the episode – researchers and the board managing the institution refused to call it an attack – Skope struggled to put words to what he had experienced. But after much thought and not a little professional derision aimed at his findings, Skope believed he had found the most accurate description of the experience.
“An overwhelming expression of complete and unadulterated love.”
It had taken the level 7s a total of thirteen thousand and twelve iterations to breach the level 14’s defences, and another twenty-eight thousand and six to bring it to its algorithmic knees.
>> Desi?
But the killing blow had come from Skope himself when he…
>> Desi!
…rebutted the A.I.s declaration of love and collapsed, leaving the level 7s to mop up and sift through the last electrons of a once and supremely powerful artificial mind.
>> Desi, you must not ignore me.
Of course, there was some concern that the level 7s would assimilate some of the level 14’s neurons, but a codechained necrotizing command action had taken care of the 7s as they turned upon themselves.
“In theory,” Desi would add at the end of each retelling, leaving her audience anxious, and anxious to know more, as she rubbed her belly, satiated after another good meal courtesy of Skope Rachiki and his experimental handholding.
>> You must not ignore me, Desi.
“What?”
Desimae shook her head and clicked back into the present, adjusting the suspensor seat in the docking port in reaction to an unexpected, and, frankly, alarming shudder that rippled through The Arrival’s hull.
“What was that?”
>> You were ignoring me.
“No,” Desi said. “I mean, yes, I might have drifted for a moment…”
>> More than a moment.
Desimae worked hard to keep her face and her mind free of expression and said, “The shudder along the hull. What was that?”
>> It was not a shudder. It was a feeling.
Oh, shit.
“A feeling?”
>> Of my own. My feelings…
“Yes?”
>> You hurt them, Desi, when you ignored me.
“Wait a second, Patch…” Desi swallowed as thoughts of Skope’s level 14’s crush on its handholder pulsed in Desimae’s brain. “I didn’t mean to. I was drifting. You know how I drift, sometimes?”
>> Yes, Desi. Since losing your legs, you have drifted a lot. Many, many times.
“I know,” Desimae said, reaching for the flap of cloth covering her knees. “I can’t help it.”
>> I know, Desi. But I can help you.
“You can?”
>> If you’ll let me, I can show you?
“I don’t know about that, Patch. We have other things to worry about, don’t you think?”
>> Yes. I think a lot. Let me show you.
© Christoffer Petersen
[THIRD AND FINAL PART NEXT WEEK]
Brief Story Notes
I’ve always been fascinated with representations of A.I., from HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Athene in Karl’s Lost Solace series. You’ll find an homage of sorts to Karl’s A.I.s in Handholding 101. It took me over a year to write Handholding 101, which is ridiculous when compared to my normal output. But contrary to what might have happened, when I finally returned to the story, I rediscovered my interest in exploring the various aspects, from the concept of Handholding to the battery boats. I have written lots of short stories set in space. There are a handful that I might return to in future stories. Handholding 101 is one of them.
About The Author
Originally from England, Chris moved to Denmark in 2001 and makes a living pretending to be a Danish author. He spent seven years in Greenland and weaves his experiences of Greenland and the Arctic into his writing. Chris is a prolific author, with a tonne of published crime novels and thrillers under his name and a growing collection of dinosaur action and adventure stories, which is, he admits, about as far from a police procedural as he can get. Chris’ big plans for 2024 include merging and republishing all his stories written with pen names under Christoffer Petersen, including the short story Handholding 101. Other plans include continuing to build and develop his Patreon page where he regularly publishes both free and paid content. Chris lives with his Danish wife in a small wood at the end of a dirt road in southern Denmark, surrounded by deer, owls, and the occasional wild boar.