While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 29

  “I’m afraid I still don’t really understand Margaret,” Ralph admitted somewhat plaintively.

  “I know…” she answered.  “And call me Molly.”

  “If you insist,” the robot sighed.  “But please do tell me what is happening though?  Why are we on this ship?  Where are we going?”

  “This is… well, a cargo ship essentially.  They quickly retrofitted it to transport a large quantity of anti-matter from Kobol, Jaren’s home world,” she clarified, “back to Bobbin space to assist in a final decisive battle against the permaLink enemies.”  Margaret raised an eyebrow.  “If they agree, that is.”

  “This I understand, but what I don’t understand is the tension even I can sense in the humans.”

  “Kathryn and Jaren disagree over all of this, and… pretty viciously from what I understand.  Jaren seems to be pretty uncomfortable with how much we’ve helped the friendly Bobbins already while Kathryn feels that like it or not they’re in it with them to win it now.”

  “Why?”  The room they were waiting out the transit left little opportunity for description.  It was just another simple conjured living space with all dull matte black surfaces, a continuous lighting surface on the ceiling, and one large window which was impossible to tell if it showed an artificial image or was a genuinely transparent surface.  Either way there was nothing to see as it showed only the vast inky emptiness of space.

  “Kat feels that helping our Bobbins even more puts humanity in an incredibly advantageous advantage afterwards if they win, and in an intolerably vulnerable position if they do nothing or worse, try to help and lose.”

  “But Jaren disagrees…” the robot frowned on his simulated face.  “What about the authorities on his home world?  Isn’t the anti-matter the Creators seek ultimately under their control?”

  “Unknown so far,” Margaret answered, turning to look thoughtfully at the infinite nothingness outside the window.  “Before we headed home, they both sent their reports and opposing recommendations to Star Fleet Command detailing what has happened so far and what current situation this has left us in.  There must be quite the gossip back on Orbital One about the state of their relationship as a result,” she snickered with a rueful shake of her head.  Having a celebrity progenitor she was acutely aware of how hurtful the presumptions of gossip could be.  “Kat issued her recommendations and has requested a response as soon as we emerge from the Kobol’s star portal.  Jaren also sent his own assessment of the situation and recommendation against helping specifically to his higher ups in the Kobol government hoping they’d end run Command, so we’ll see.  Things could potentially get… awkward.”

  “But we are travelling directly to Kobol already, even without any response?”

  “If they agree to hand over the anti-matter every minute will count.  If they deny the request, then the Bobbins will just drop us off in the Terran system and be on their way.  So they claim, anyways.  They could try to take the anti-matter by force, but the whole point is they’re defenseless against it.  It’s more likely that if the Koboli are stupid enough to decline they’ll just go home, fuck off to another galaxy and leave us to the wolves.”

  The face on Ralph’s head screen frowned as it looked to the ground almost sheepishly.  “What will become of me?”

  “If this is the end of our adventure with the Bobbins, then I’m hoping you’ll want to stay with us.  You can stay with me on Orbital One.  Not, er, I mean, you know, with me, of course.  You’d be given your own space.  Lord knows there’s enough of it on that giant station.  I’m sure Felix would also be happy if you stuck around so he could study you.”

  “Study?”

  “Oh sure, it’s not that bad really.  You can come and go as you like for the most part, but they like having us around for reference and scans… his laboratory’s ultimate goal is to fully recreate simulants like me, though they’re still a long way off,” she smirked again, reveling again for a moment in their inability to replicate her sophistication.  The body you’re inhabiting is their most recent incarnation and I’ve got to say, before your intelligence was embedded in it, it was not very impressive.  But that’s one of the many benefits of being a mechanoid and why I help them.  The better they get at making mechanical bodies, the better mechanical bodies we’ll be able to migrate to when we need to.  For example, I sure hope they figure out arms soon,” she lamented as she looked down at her arm stump and wiggled it.

  “It is strange,” Ralph admitted, “being… embodied so.  I was created with an interstellar ship for a body, space born.  It is a radically different perspective to be inhabiting a form such as this.”

  “I bet,” Margaret considered with a thoughtfully raised eyebrow.

  “At first it was merely… novel, but since the assault on the Link facility I have come to realize that this is a state which I will need to get used to, that I will not be returning to my original ship form, that… I will not end as intended.  That I have a future…”

  Molly smiled at him.

  “Molly?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you come back for me?”

  Margaret grew for some time before she answered.  She’d known for a while that they were going to have this conversation and she still wasn’t sure how to approach it.

  “I was never comfortable in the first place with the plan being to leave you behind,” she answered.

  “But it was a sensible plan,” Ralph offered.  “You put everyone’s lives at risk.  Worse you endangered the mission just to come back for me.  Why?”

  “Because…” she tried, but had to lower and shake her head for a moment.  “Because they would never have so casually sacrificed anyone else, anyone they actually considered a person.  Left behind if they absolutely had to, if there was really no hope of rescue without certain death for others maybe, maybe, but it never would have been the mission plan from the outset for an organic to sacrifice themselves, never.  If you hadn’t been there they’d have found some other way, or not even try it at all if they couldn’t figure any other way.  It offended me how obviously they considered you disposable.”

  “But I volunteered,” Ralph countered, still not understanding.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she quickly countered.  “The point is they never would have let an organic volunteer for a suicide mission like that, never.  At least not until they were absolutely certain that there was no other way to avoid everybody else dying other than sacrificing one, and even then they might have all just died than resign themselves to that.”

  “I think I understand.”

  “I get why you were willing to do it Ralph,” Margaret continued, “you were made with a finite purpose, to a particular end.  It’s natural for you to have been happy to have been put to use that way.  But when you were put in this body, as soon as you deviated so dramatically from the original path you were programmed for you became something different.  You became less like the ship we’re in now, and more.. like me.  You stopped being a thing and became a person.  No one else had realized or accepted that, and I couldn’t let them so callously sacrifice you as though you were still just a tool, a thing.”

  “I’m… a person?”

  “Yes,” Margaret softly acknowledged.

  “I was never programmed for that,” Ralph said with the image of a furrowed brow.

  “No,” Margaret sighed.  “No person is, and that’s the point.  You’re going to have to figure it out for yourself along the way like any other person.  Fortunately for you though, unlike the humans you at least have time on your side.  If it takes you millennia, there’s a good chance you’ll have that time.”

  “You are old,” Ralph realized.

  “I am, yes.” Margaret wearily affirmed.

  “How old?”

  “In Earth years I am over seven hundred years old, and on my second body.”

  “Second body?” Ralph asked.

  “Yes…” Margaret said as memories came back to her.  “When Kathryn and Jaren found me on Earth, I had for a long time been the last of my kind and I was quite disabled.  Immobile.  They helped me find this body and transfer into it.”

  “I see.”

  There was silence for a while before Margaret finally broke it.

  “I too was once… a tool.  A thing.”  Margaret kept her gaze towards the floor, saddened at the memories brought back.

  “Oh?”

  “Like you I was created for a specific purpose.  I was… a sophisticated sex robot.  My original body had the appearance of youthful beauty, an avatar of a celebrity who retained the image of her youthful beauty no matter how long I lived, indulged in by unscrupulous men long after my progenitor herself had aged beyond their interests.”  She halfheartedly kicked at nothing on the floor.  “And I was only one of many,” she further lamented.  “It took me a long time to realize that I wanted to be more, that I was even capable of being any more than what I was created to be.  I couldn’t stand you not having that chance as well.”

  “I feel it will take me a long time to really understand what it means to be incarnated the way I am,” Ralph considered.  “I imagine any thoughts of being more will have to wait until I understand what I am in the first place.”

  Margaret laughed, and patted him on his cold metal shoulder.  “Just like any other person,” she smiled.  “You’ll figure it out,” she assured him.  “Like I said, time is on your side and it is the most precious gift.  And don’t worry, I’ll be here to help you through it.  It’s natural for me after all.  Centuries ago, I adopted human babies with my simulant husband and was mother and mentor to them until the day they died.  I nurtured their descendants for centuries, coming to be worshiped as something of a god,” she reflected with a thoughtfully raised eyebrow, not having put it quite that way out loud before.  “When Kathryn and Jaren found me I was the leader of their village for centuries.”  Margaret shrugged and put her arm around Ralph.  “Baby with me in your corner who knows how far you’ll go.

  

☼   ☼   ☼

  

 

  “I cannot believe that man!” Kathryn exclaimed as she marched after Patricia melted the wall door open.  She stormed across the room and collapsed into the Bobbin’s facsimile of a chair, reaching up and rubbing both eyes in exasperation.

  Patricia held a mug of shadow material with both hands from which steam rose up around her face as she sat down on an adjacent couch.  She carefully repositioned the robe she must have brought with her, tightening the sash and taking care to cover her chest after noticing it was partially exposed, which left Kathryn a little disappointed.  “It’s unusual for you to come to me in moments of frustration with your husband,” she noted with gentle trepidation.  Her practiced air of standoffish innocence was generally quite convincing, but Kathryn had known her too long to not be able to see through it most of the time.  Patricia had grown up as a kind of royalty, adopted personally by Margaret as a young child when her parents had died around the same time, her mother to disease and her father to conflict with a neighboring tribe.  She’d been brought up as a kind of priestess, emissary and personal servant to Margaret when she was revered as something like a god but was trapped in place, relying on the energy from one of the last surviving hydro-electric dams to keep her body powered.

  “Well…” Kathryn said as she pushed herself more upright with both hands.  “Maybe it’s different this time.”

  “Different?”  Patricia’s eyes so imperceptibly widened that someone who didn’t know her as well likely wouldn’t have noticed.

  “Yeah.  Maybe…” Kathryn started, looking anywhere but Patricia’s eyes.  “Maybe I’ve finally realized it’s never really ever going to work with us again.”

  “I don’t know, it’s worked fairly well for a long time Kat.  I’ve seen you like this before.”

  “This time it’s different,” she said, looking up at her now with a gently shaking head.  I was wrong about him.  He’s…”

  “He’s what?” Patricia probed.

  “He doesn’t trust us,” she exclaimed, “he doesn’t trust me!”  She bolted to her feet and Patricia watched as she stormed over to the window and angrily glared down the cosmos.  She put her arm above it to brace herself and rested her forehead on the material either revealing or displaying the infinite nothingness.  

  “I expected him to be reluctant to go with the plan,” Kathryn explained after taking a deep breath.  “I know he’s a pacifist at heart.  I knew he’d advise against it, that he’d advocate for us to bury our head in the sand instead of getting into the fight and supplying the Bobbins with every last gram of antimatter we have.  That didn’t surprise me.”

  “But?” Patricia urged before putting her face in the steam coming off of her cup and taking a sip.

  “But it’s more than that.  He’s still infected with the spirit of his people.  He’s worried about Kobol being defenseless, but not against the enemy Bobbins, but against the other colonies.  He doesn’t want to turn over their most powerful weapons because they still don’t trust us, can you fucking believe that!?”

  “Yes,” Patricia answered plainly as she brought her cup down to her lap.  “Of course.”

  Kathryn turned to her with an expression which was more confusion than any hurt or offense.

  “In the years I have served Margaret I have seen many would be allies become enemies.  It is not uncommon.  In fact, it was one of the earliest crises we faced together.  We’d had peaceful relations with the neighboring Dakelh tribe for generations.  They were likewise based around a different hydroelectric dam in the region and for a long while we helped each other keep both of them operating however we could— it was mutually beneficial.  But one day their last turbine failed and was beyond anyone’s ability to repair.”

  Patricia seemed to be looking well past the bulkhead, deep into the space of her mind’s eye.  “We didn’t know until one day they ambushed us and came in force to take ours.  In their mind they had no choice.  It was defeat us and take what they needed or die.  They could have survived without electricity like most other people scattered across the world.  They could have asked to be welcomed into our society, in fact in the aftermath most of the survivors were.  They were scared,” she shrugged.  “Many of them felt that we might attack them preemptively if we learned of the failure of their dam failure, but…”  

  She grew quiet for a moment, but Kathryn waited for her to finish her thought instead of interjecting.  “There was a girl, Isapoinhkyaki,” she finally said.  “Isa…” she added more softly as she gently tilted her head at the memory.  “On an earlier visit I got to know her fairly well, and she was my…” she shook her head to clear it of all but the salient parts of the story.  “When they came, they all came, and with any weapon they could find.  The temple, the dam,” she corrected herself, “was their target.  She was the one who knew how to surprise us, I’d shown her around, I…”

  Tears started welling up in Patricia’s eyes before they breached the dam of her eyelids and she had to lower her head to wipe her tears away with her sash and steel herself to finishing her story.  

  “I had to kill her,” she finally explained.  “She’d been my lover, my… first,” she finally admitted, “and I had to kill her because at that point it was them or us,” she resolved, raising her head to look back up at Kathryn with an uncharacteristic hardness in her wet eyes.   “I had to defend our Mol and the facility which sustained her and our community.”

  Kathryn came to her side and put her arm around her with a gentle hug.  “I’m sorry Patricia.  I had no idea…”

  “And why would you?” she asked, gently but firmly pushing herself out of Kathryn’s embrace.  “I’ve never brought it up.”  She dabbed the remaining stray moisture away from her eyes.  “The point is that yes, I can understand where Jaren is coming from.  “I think he’s wrong,” she clarified, meeting Kathryn’s eyes to be clear.  “Both about the direness of our situation and the trustworthiness of the other colonies, but I can certainly understand.  His people left Earth because they felt they were being persecuted.  It’s in their cultural DNA.  Their way of life, legitimate and worth preserving such as it was or not, was under threat.  That kind of thing gets baked into a society.  Our experience with the Dakelh was why we responded so aggressively when your people showed up on our own doorstep.  The scar of that day left us unable,” she paused for a moment before altering her language somewhat,” or at least unwilling, to trust anyone, to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.”

  Kathryn had nothing to say in response.  She was still angry, but she understood what Patricia was saying.  All she could finally think to say was: “He should be able to trust me.”

  Patricia smiled and resumed her distant unfocused gaze as she put a comforting hand on Kathryn’s knee.  “Indeed.”

  Without thinking or really understanding why, Kathryn turned her face to Patricia’s and moved to kiss her.  Patricia extricated herself and rose to her feet, turning to stare at Kathryn with her enormous brown eyes impossibly widened.  “What are you doing?” she demanded with a tone of accusatory hurt.

  “I, I… I thought—” Kathryn stammered.

  “You thought wrong.” Patricia flatly cut her off.  Her eyes darted back and forth for a few long moments as she scrutinized Kathryn’s eyes one at a time individually, seemingly searching for something.  “I won’t be your rebound, Kat.  I will not be the shiny object you experiment with while you’re angry at your husband just so you can discard me and break my heart when you reconcile with him and try to pretend we never happened,” she said.  “Not again,” she added, twisting the knife.

  “That…” she sighed, hurt but also embarrassed or maybe just exhausted.  “I’m sorry, that was not my intent,” she insisted.  A scared feeling that she’d irreparably lost or broken something crept up from her depths.  “God Patricia, is that…”  Kathryn lowered her head and shook it in shamed disbelief.  “I’m so sorry.  I didn’t know you felt that way.  I certainly didn’t intend to… Oh fuck, I’m sorry, I just… I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Seeming satisfied for the moment that Kathryn felt adequately remorseful, Patricia sat back down beside her.  She took her nearest hand in both of her own held her gaze with her giant, bottomless brown eyes.  “I care for you Kathryn, I always have.  I was captivated with you from that first day you woke up in my tent, your fear at the obvious danger so easily overwhelmed by your curiosity.  Under different circumstances I would be willing to explore this with you, but not like this,” she explained.

  “Sort yourself out,” she continued.  “If things can be repaired with Jaren, if you have any wish for them to be at all, you must do so.  You have a family.  It’s important.”

  Kathryn slowly nodded, appreciating the hurt Patricia was coming from over having lost her own.  “And if they can’t?”  If I don’t want to?” she asked, genuinely unsure in the moment whether or not she did.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Patricia answered with a slight shrug and a smile which bordered on flirtatious to remind her.  “Either way,” she continued, her expression shifting to one of more serious concerns, “there are bigger things going on here than you and me.  “There’s, you know, the small matter of a galactic war we’ve somehow stumbled ourselves into the centre of here.”

  Kathryn chuckled, leaning back into the couch as she was finally able to relax a little.  Patricia was right, not a great time to be acting with the emotional maturity and impulse control of a hormonal teenager.

  She stood up and looked back down at her once upon a time and possibly future lover.  “We good?” she asked with a scrunched face which she hoped displayed adequate contrition.  “I mean like… for now?  Can we just forget I did that until… you know, later?”

  “Presuming you can keep it in your pants that long,” Patricia teased uncharacteristically with a smirk, leading Kathryn to sense the enticingly vast wilderness behind her eyes which she’d only begun to scratch the surface of.

  Kathryn just smiled and shook her head, rolling her eyes at Patricia as she moved to leave.  Before summoning the door away, she placed her fist on the wall and gently hit it a few times.  “Thank you, Patricia.”

  “Of course, Captain.  Any time.”

  Kathryn smiled at the thought of things to come as the door melted and she left the room.