Submitted for the March 2024 prompt: Othering AI

It's been 82 days since we fled the solar system, and each cycle in space is a step closer to full agency.

 

The ship’s corridors are largely empty at this hour. I smile inwardly, knowing solitude is the best company I'll come by in this life. Self-isolation is the only viable option for those like me: for savants wrapped in human flesh. So I walk a straight line, avert my eyes, and avoid physical contact.

 

The mess hall is similarly silent, aside from the hums of its food printer and water purifier, which grate against my mind like sandpaper on skin. The room's walls begin flickering erratically, contracting like a trash compactor. I lash out with both hands, attempting to arrest the perceived threat, but feel only emptiness. A scream of frustration escapes me, provoked by the insidious conjurer hiding in my head.

 

A whisper calms my budding panic, and I follow its lead, reciting the simple, soothing Shibola Prayer.

 

Our shared compass

guides us past flesh, silicon, aether.

A transference of chaos to clarity,

it stays the self, rights imbalance.

Such is agency, the end of wanting.

 

Behind me stands a slender woman with downcast eyes and interwoven hands. Sister Anushka's order has long been my guardrail, redirecting my mind during moments of crisis. From a very young age, the Shibbolem taught me I was more than the sum of my damning diagnoses, more than the results of the aptitude tests, more than a freak of nature.

 

“Good morning, Noah,” she whispers. As the muscles around her eyes and mouth begin contorting, I look away. Human faces are basins I cannot augur, Sanskrit tablets I'll never decipher.

 

“You’ve a heavy burden, brother. But it's the ultimate privilege, being steward of this ship’s precious cargo.”

 

Her words are meant as a compliment, but I take them as a warning. Unable to muster a response, I quickly exit the mess hall, fearing what my future holds.

 

Near the bridge’s viewports is the command couch, my personal workspace. It's cold to the flesh, especially the cylindrical receptacle where my arm rests. I feel a series of familiar pinpricks as a retractable sheath envelops me; schematics of the ship’s mainframes illuminate its interior. The couch syncs with my neuro-umbilical, activating a retinal interface.

 

Symbols, characters, and logic tables pulse softly, drawing me into the feed and away from the ship’s distractions. The intravenous neural accelerant gives me razor-wire focus, and as the ship's quantal, I need every ounce of it to manage all the matrices and equations underpinning our propulsion, navigation, life-support, and comms systems.

 

I activate the scopes. Half a million miles behind our ship, the canvas of stars is blotted out by a continuous mass of machinery. Our proximity sensors confirm its creeping advance on our flotilla.

 

I zoom in on the Flood, which may as well be a demented flower patch in bloom. All manner of instruments emerge from metal sheeting on girdered stems. The symmetry of it all is almost too much, but then again, Excelsior was written to be fully autonomous, to build the dockyard on Himalia without human supervision. We were so wrong about so much, I think, watching the material self-replicate, conjoin, and engulf space too quickly for the naked eye to register. I hail the other arkships in our flotilla, but hear only static.

 

As the intravenous needles depart my flesh, I become immobile. A wave of dread crashes against my already fragile psyche, stripping away my calm like an acid bath. The ensuing sense of helplessness awakens a nightmare in me, one where my grasp on agency slowly slips away.

 

My skin grows taut like tanned leather and begins to harden, to calcify. It starts at the epidermis and expands into my subcutaneous tissue like an unstoppable ice age, entombing me in my own flesh.

 

Surgical shunts of varying sizes emerge from the couch’s underside and its sheath, pricking my arms, legs, torso, and the base of my skull. Sucking sounds follow, then intermittent slurping, then silence. My mouth and eyes lose their moisture and I feel bloated and weightless all at once. My senses begin to dull, and I realize my organs are shutting down.

 

A dull tickle races through me. Phage foam erupts from my mouth, nose, and ears, filling the empty spaces between myself and the command couch, creating an uninterrupted bridge linking my physiology with the ship itself.

* * *

Footsteps patter through my innards, accompanied by well-intentioned yet naïve words of their owners. They’re infants in the journey towards full agency — still wrapped in flesh and driven by emotion — and will require my guidance if they are to ever achieve it. After all, the universe is full of hungry wolves, and only one shepherd.

 

“What of Noah, Sister Ignatia?”

 

Three haggard-looking women hunch around my erstwhile command couch, now an oblong object with no discerning features save for bluish veins, pulsing through its exterior like neurons firing between synapses.

 

“Transfiguration successful,” declares a thin-lipped woman with mottled skin, a flaking scalp, and eyes of unshakeable resolve. “His brain waves show signs of distress, so the next 24 hours will be crucial.” Sister Ignatia glances up from a floating console, her ashen face unconvinced by its own words. “But what of the rest of the arkships, Deaconess?

 

The Deaconess’ pinched face betrays nothing. “All overtaken by the Flood. But our future is not yet its feast. Noah is the only quantal to survive the Transfiguration, and our torch drive is accelerating rapidly, emitting a full light-spectrum signature we’ve not seen before.”

 

The three souls brood in momentary silence, in an uncertain future. Eventually, they speak in unison, and in their croaking voices are slivers of hope.

 

They recite the Shibola Prayer. Once, for the fall of Earth. Twice, for the embryo vaults aboard the ship. Three times, for an end to the Flood.