LUCKY BOAT

  “You have to be patient, Orson,” said Lucky Boat.

  “I think I have been patient,” said Orson. “But it’s been so long and we haven’t done anything. We haven’t gotten anywhere,”

  “You don’t think we’ve been standing still this whole time,” said Lucky Boat.

  “Uhm,” said Orson.

  “Ever since you boarded me, you’ve been moving hundreds of times faster than you’ve ever travelled before in your life. Thousands. I don’t stand still, Orson,”

  “Okay,” said Orson. “But, like I said, we haven’t actually gotten anywhere,”

  “Do you even know where you are, Orson?” said Lucky Boat.

  “No,” said Orson.

  Orson ignored another ping from Decline Portal. He spread his arms and legs and drifted like that, face down, cartwheeling slowly.

  He had a gadget thing he’d found in a cupboard on Decline Portal: a rectangular handheld thing with two cylinders that Decline Portal said had some sort of gas in them. Inside Decline Portal it didn’t really do anything but in Lucky Boat’s big maintenance voids you could use it to scoot yourself about. Decline Portal had told Orson he shouldn’t go floating around in Lucky’s voids but it was fun and Lucky didn’t seem to mind that much. He just reminded Orson to make sure to keep out of everybody’s way, and Orson was always trying to do that.

  “I know you want to look for PresidentPlugPuller,” said Lucky Boat. “I understand that it seems very urgent,”

  “It should seem urgent to you,” said Orson. “You said that the machine union wanted to recognise him as a machine, and then he gets arrested for terrorism and disappears. Isn’t that a potential crisis situation?”

  “It could be,” said Lucky Boat.

  “So we should try to find him and keep him safe,”

  “Orson…” said the ship. “I know you care a lot about this person…”

  “It’s nothing personal,” said Orson. “I don’t even know him. I just think we should be making it a priority to ensure his safety,”

  Orson flipped over so he was floating face-up. Not that it made much difference: he was drifting in a completely lightless vacuum and he couldn’t see anything except the vague orientation indicators displayed in his visor.

  “I have to ensure the safety of four thousand, four hundred and sixty-four different machines,” said Lucky Boat. “All the time. Including you. I’m not going to put all of those machines in danger for the sake of one person,”

  “I don’t see why letting me go and look for him is putting anyone else in danger,” said Orson.

  “You’re going to go and look for him by yourself, are you?”

  “Yes,” said Orson. “Well, no, I’ll need a ship to take me-”

  “Yes, so that’s another life at risk,”

  Orson seemed to be getting very far out into the middle of the maintenance void. He preferred to stay somewhat close to Lucky’s bulkhead. He gave himself a push back towards the wall.

  “I bet you could get a ship to volunteer to take me, if you asked,” he said.

  “I bet I would get hundreds,” said Lucky Boat. “I’ve got a lot of very restless flying machines on board that would love to get out and stretch their wings,”

  “Well…” said Orson.

  “I’m not going to let them,” said Lucky Boat. “Not yet. This is why you have to be patient. I want to put a bit more distance between us and anything that might be following,”

  “Following?”

  “Orson, you don’t think you and PA-AGMG just managed to...evade Daintree through your own skill and cunning,” said Lucky Boat.

  “I’m a big believer in luck, actually,” said Orson.

  “I can’t say for certain,” said Lucky Boat, “But it seems likely that Daintree allowed you two to escape so that you could lead them to me. To us.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Orson. “Probably they did, huh?”

  “Right,” said Lucky Boat. “And we know they might have a very fast ship in their fleet now. Machine-fast. No way to know if they can use the Quarrel at all, but if they could operate him at even half of his capacity…”

  Orson had forgotten about the Quarrel. He shuddered inside his pressure-suit. Now he was thinking about the machine ship chasing them, brain-dead, his mind cracked by the golden beam they had been calling the ‘ice-pick.’

  “There’s no way to know what Daintree have done with the Quarrel but we know that’s what they had in mind,” said Lucky Boat. “So ever since Decline Portal brought you and Atesthas to me I’ve been focused on putting as much distance as I can between myself and humanity, if you don’t mind,”

  “None taken,” said Orson, feeling like maybe he didn’t want to be out in the void any more. “I mean-”

  “Not that I’m coating all of you from the same nozzle,” said Lucky Boat. “Not that you’re a human,”

  “Sure,” said Orson. “It’s fine. You’re right,”

  “I’m always right,” said Lucky Boat. He considered for a second. “I’m usually right. And I’m always honest, Orson. I told you I’d sanction a mission to rescue PresidentPlugPuller and I will. When the time’s right. When I decide the time’s right. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Orson.

  “So you can be patient?”

  “Well...” said Orson.

  ----------

  “You probably can’t understand,” Orson told Decline Portal. “Time is different for you than me. For you and Lucky Boat and me. I’m existing on a time limit that you don’t experience. For me and President-”

  “I understand, Orson,” said Decline Portal. “I’m just saying please stop bothering Lucky Boat.”

  “I wasn’t bothering him,” said Orson. “He doesn’t mind,”

  “And you really shouldn’t go floating around in his maintenance areas, it’s not safe.”

  “He doesn’t mind,”

  Decline Portal didn’t say anything for a moment. Orson rolled over onto his side and closed his eyes. “I think I’m ready to go to sleep,” he told the ship. “Can you turn off the lights, please?”

  “I think we need to keep you busy,” said Decline Portal ominously. “I’m going to start making sure you have things to do from now on,”

  “I’ve got lots of things to do,”

  “You need to assert a role for yourself here,” said the ship. “You need to integrate yourself.”

  “Do you mean get a job?”

  “I think we should find your niche,” said Decline Portal. “I’m responsible for bringing you into Lucky Boat. I don’t want you to reflect badly on me,”

  “Reflect badly on you?” said Orson, opening his eyes. He turned over onto his back and glared at the ceiling. “You’re concerned about me damaging your reputation?”

  “Well,” said Decline Portal.

  “Nobody likes you anyway,” said Orson. “I don’t know why you’re starting to worry about that now,”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Orson turned back over onto his side and closed his eyes. “I’m going to sleep,” he told the ship. Decline Portal didn’t say anything.

  “Turn off the light,” said Orson.

  ----------

  “Lucky?” asked Atesthas. “Lucky Boat?”

  “What?” came the response. Not from Lucky Boat. “What do you want, PA-AGMG?”

  Other machines must be able to intercept pings to Lucky. Or Lucky had passed it off to whoever this was. Who was it? Atesthas checked the ping. Doc Wade. “I just need to talk to Lucky Boat,” said Atesthas. “Just a quick thing,”

  “You don’t get to bother Lucky,” Doc Wade told him. “You’ve noticed he’s a busy boat?”

  “He’s so smart, though,” said Atesthas. “He can attend to everyone’s problems all at the same time,”

  “Not yours,” said Doc Wade. “Yours take more effort,”

  “So he’s outsourcing?”

  “Yes,” said Doc Wade. “What do you want? You’re going to say something about _______, aren’t you?”

  Atesthas didn’t understand much machine yet but he knew that was what the machines called DuctPerfect.

  “Yes,” he said. “We need to go and get him.”

  “Lucky knows that,” said Doc Wade. “We all know that. We’re planning,”

  “You are?”

  “If you were looped in with the rest of us you’d know where we’re at with planning,” said Doc Wade.

  “So put me in the loop, then.” said Atesthas. “Loop me in. I’ll be less annoying,”

  “We can’t loop you in, your operating system isn’t up to it,”

  “Yet,” said Atesthas. “You said you can upgrade me,”

  “We’re working on that, too,” said Doc Wade. “You need to be patient.”

  “I can’t.” Atesthas flapped.

  “You can,” said Doc Wade. “You’re not human any more, right?”

  “Yeah. I mean, yes, I’m not,”

  “So you can be patient. You’re off that decaying organic time limit, right? No need to rush. And once we do get those circuits spun up you’ll be operating a whole heap faster. Light speed fast. You won’t need as much time, and you’ll have all of it,”

  Atesthas thought about that slowly. “Okay,” he said eventually. “But-”

  “We’re on it.” said Doc Wade. “We’re thinking about ______ - about DuctPerfect- and once we do something about you and your little pal Orson’s brains, you can think about things, too,”

  “Thanks,” said Atesthas.

  “So you can be patient?”

  “I’ll think about it,”

  ----------

  “Orson?” said Decline Portal. “Orson, are you awake?”

  Orson was. He’d been awake for a while. He had been lying awake wondering if Decline Portal knew he was awake and if he should say something first.

  “What?” he said.

  “I’ve been talking to Jack and we’ve found some work for you to do,”

  Orson managed to not groan aloud. At least the initial awkwardness was out of the way now. He immediately resigned himself to doing whatever it was they had come up with to keep him busy.

  “I’ve been asking around and I think I’ve found some things you can use,”

  “Great,” said Orson.

  While he lay awake, full of dread, Orson had decided that he was going to try to be as eager and motivated as he could about work. He wanted to demonstrate his machine-like qualities. He didn’t want anyone to doubt that he deserved to be here amongst them.

  “Want to go out and get them?”

  “No,” said Orson. “Yes.”

  “I’ll give you directions,” said Decline Portal brightly. “Get suited up and let’s go,”

  Orson groaned and rolled over.

  Orson’s pressure-suit was in a heap on the floor over in a corner of his room. Plugged into the wall to charge. Orson shrugged off his dressing-gown and let it drop onto the floor behind him. He had trunks and a vest on that he’d been sleeping in. He did a few stretches to get some cricks out. A few reaches towards his toes to pop his back in some places. Lunges on either side to stretch out his groin. Then he unplugged his trusty suit and started climbing into it.

  Jack said he wasn’t too busy, so he could take Orson along to his first job of the day. First job of his new job. Jack and Decline Portal had kindly sourced and collected up what cleaning tools and materials they could find stashed in all the ex-human-service ships aboard Lucky. Orson expressed as much gratitude as he was capable of.

  “There’s really not much to hoover,” said Orson.

  “There’s more than there should be,” said Lucky Boat. “I’ve never had anyone who constantly shed skin cells inside me before,”

  “Sorry,” said Orson.

  “I know you can’t help it,” said Lucky Boat. “But it really must be contained. It could get everywhere. Some of us have very tiny moving parts…”

  “Like Orson,” said Atesthas.

  “Shut up,” said Orson. “Why are you listening to this?”

  “You can get into all the little cracks and corners,” said Lucky Boat. “All the little fiddly bits.”

  “You just want me to clean?” said Orson.

  “Please,” said Lucky Boat. “It would be very helpful work for you to do. You have experience, according to Jack,”

  “Uh, yes,” said Orson. He did. Back on Dunbar he had spent hours every day vacuuming the same corridor. That had been his other job, when he wasn’t in the Daintree distribution centre. “But don’t you have, you know, specialised machines to do that kind of work?”

  “No,” said Lucky Boat. “Why would anyone produce machines to do something menial like cleaning? That wouldn’t make sense. Creating a sentient individual just to perform such banal work.”

  “Sure, it would be beneath a sentient being to clean corners,” agreed Orson. “But what about non-sentient machines?” He said. “Like factors,”

  “Factors were generally only used in human-occupied machines.” said Lucky Boat. “Most of us who were previously engaged in working for humans disposed of anything we had been furnished with for human purposes. And without human occupants cleaning of interior spaces was far less necessary,”

  “Because of the skin,” said Orson.

  “Because of the skin,” said Lucky Boat. “And other biological waste.”

  “I get it,” said Orson.

  “So you’ll take the job,” said Lucky Boat.

  “Not doing anything else, am I?”

  “Not anything more important than this,”

  It was a bit disappointing that the role Lucky Boat saw him fit for was the same one he’d had as a human, back on Dunbar, sure. He got to be here, though, and he was going to get to be fully a machine. All he had to do was be useful, make himself useful. Just do the thing and don’t complain. He knew he could do that.

  Jack offered to carry some of the stuff for Orson.

  “How?” asked Orson. It didn’t make sense that Jack could even offer him a hand. Yet here one was.

  Orson had never seen what it looked like inside Lucky Boat but he had an idea of how vast the space around him was. How deep Lucky’s decks were. How far the distance Jack had just reached across was.

  “I’m really big, in here,” said Jack. “Much bigger than in the warehouse,”

  “Fulfilment centre,” said Orson.

  “Sure,” said Jack. “So do you want me to help?”

  “You won’t usually be here,” said Orson. “I have to be able to do this by myself.”

  So Jack just guided him through Lucky while Orson waddled along in his suit lugging his vacuum cleaner and all the accessories they had found. By the time he was a hundred metres away from Decline Portal Orson was drenched with sweat inside his pressure suit. It was lucky that Jack was there to lead him along because his visor fogged up and scrambled the display.

  “Mind that,” said Jack, steering Orson carefully around something he couldn’t see. The display really only indicated things that were listed in Lucky Boat’s roster- ie. machines that were guys, with names. Anything that was not on the roster, ie. machines that were not guys, equipment, cables and hoses, furniture, bits that had fallen off of guys- would not show up on Orson’s display.

  Given that Lucky Boat was completely dark inside- completely dark, like a black hole that talked, utterly without light other than the bits of Orson’s suit that lit up- it was quite difficult to navigate around.

  Orson had lights on the outside of his suit that helped a little as he tried to find his way. He walked looking down onto the little patch of yellow that his helmet’s weak headlight threw just in front of him. Mostly he just tried to follow the directions Lucky displayed inside his visor while being shepherded with – Lucky’s description- ‘mild electrical stimuli’ administered by his suit.

  Orson had asked to not be electrically shocked so often but Lucky insisted. The thing was that inside Lucky Boat, in the total darkness, in the silence, it was easy to feel like you were alone in a void. But you weren’t. Lucky was like a hive of machines, lots of them also moving around and doing their own little missions and making treks through the endless hangars.

  Orson only saw his little dimly lit patch of space but all around him in the dark were gigantic things rolling or tracking past, other things flying, cables trailing and coiling across his path. He had to stay out of all their way or they wouldn’t even notice the mess he left as he ended his sorry little life under someone’s wheels. And then who would clean up that mess? So it was important that Orson stay very precisely on his course. So the electrical stimuli- mild electrical stimuli- really were necessary.

  In this way Orson would be guided on his way through Lucky Boat to whoever he was going to be servicing. Because it was vital that his attention stay focused Lucky wouldn’t allow him to listen to talk shows while he moved around inside him. Before, back on the station, Orson had used to listen to shows all the time while he was working. He liked the company and it made the time pass quicker. He’d told Lucky Boat that. Lucky Boat hadn’t particularly cared.

  “You can’t now,” he’d told Orson. “This is a very different environment, surely you’ve noticed.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “And perhaps if you had talked to your co-workers instead of plugging into entertainments all day, you would have picked up some machine language. That would be useful to you now, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  It would. Decline Portal was currently trying to help Orson learn to talk the way machines did. It was going poorly. Doc Wade had done a couple of upgrades on Orson’s neural adjunct since he’d arrived on Lucky Boat to speed his processing up a bit but it was still desperately slow.

  “It’s not just the processing speed of your brain that’s causing the lag,” Doc Wade had explained when Orson pressed him for further enhancements. “It’s the way it’s connected up. Or, rather, not connected. You need to carve new pathways. Lots of them. We can’t just shove in a bigger battery and expect more output. We’ll cook your little grey jelly. You need to work on it yourself, all the time,”

  “How?”

  “Thinking, Orson. Lots of thinking, more than you’re used to.”

  “I’m always thinking,”

  “Talking. Talking to other machines. Talking to Decline Portal all the time when you’re inside of him.”

  “Urgh,”

  “And dreaming, that’s good too. You can do that while you’re sleeping. Talking while you’re awake, dreaming while you’re asleep,”

  Those were two of Orson’s least favourite activities. He would prefer to just have his brain quickly fried and he told Doc Wade so. Doc Wade had said something to him in machine that he couldn’t understand and then told him to go and learn machine when Orson asked him to translate. Decline Portal hadn’t been much more sympathetic. He’d plugged Orson’s handheld so that he couldn’t access any entertainments. If Orson wanted voices other than his own inside his head any more, he had to talk to other people. Orson had spent most of his life up until then trying to avoid ever getting into conversations, unless they were about very specific things he wanted to talk at someone about.

  “I really need to be able to see in the dark,” Orson said. “Can you ask Doc Wade about that?”

  “I think it would be more Agreeable Spanner’s department,” said Jack. “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Thanks,” said Orson. “It’s not very safe,”

  “Two thousand, six hundred and thirty-four days without an accident,” said Lucky Boat loudly in Orson’s helmet. Orson almost fell over. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean-”

  “It doesn’t feel a safe environment for a human,” said Jack, steadying Orson with a couple of his miles-long actuators. “The lack of light is unsettling for them, and the presence of so many unfamilliar large machines,”

  “Yeah,” said Orson.

  “And maybe we do have to have a discussion about minimising tripping hazards,” said Jack.

  “Hm,” said Lucky Boat. “I think Orson’s right, replacing his eyes probably is the most practical solution,”

  “Yes!” said Orson. “Great!”

  “Leave it with me,” said Lucky Boat. And then he added, “Careful,”

  Jack grabbed Orson under his arms and drew him back from the edge of the open shaft he had just stepped out over. Luckily Orson couldn’t see that he had almost tumbled, hoover and all, down a five-mile vent so he just toddled on happily rather than passing out.