Maya: a non-romantic love affair between a girl, a boy, a semi-parasitic alien and an insane AI (Patreon)

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by friction. --Heinrich Heine

  

Maya had her knee jammed up into the underside of a broken H-conduit and her arc welder heating the broken edge when she heard the captain’s bellow. “Maya, what the fuck have you done to my ship?” 

She sighed. When Unth drank, he always got unhappy about something, but he could go harass Hiram this time. She was trying to repair enough of their salvaged space junk that they could get a decent price for it at dock. The rebels and smugglers that came limping into the border docks paid good money for spare parts, but none of them wanted to take the time to repair old or broken ones. “Busy here,” she yelled.

“Get out here or I’ll haul you out from under that thing,” he said, and his voice was close.

After turning off her welder and setting her equipment aside, Maya rolled out from under the enormous conduit. “Excuse me?”

Unth stood with his arms crossed over his chest. Like a lot of humans born on Ribelo, he was a chimera. In order to escape government tracking, the separatists on Ribelo had perfected a system that caused women to fertilize two or three eggs at a time, but one fetus usually absorbed the smaller ones, leaving the surviving child with two or three different genetic codes. It had confounded the medical tracking system, and most Ribelians looked like perfect normal humans, which made them even harder to monitor when they moved in-system. However Unth’s two genetic codes had expressed in his skin, leaving him with pale cream and a darker olive tones that reminded Maya of a spotted dog. And right now, he was clearly an angry dog. “Why are your quarters allocated more resource use than mine?”

“What are you talking about?”

He took an aggressive step forward. “I’m talking about you fucking with my ship’s environmental controls, and that sort of sabotage will get your curvy ass thrown out an airlock.” He looked her up and down.

Cold anger raced through Maya’s veins. She had made it perfectly clear when she took this job that she was a damn fine welder and tool maker, and a respectable mechanic, and any other skills the captain might want were off the table. She thanked the Lord and her own genetic constitution that she had the height to challenge Unth. She stepped right into his space and stood toe to toe. “Comment on my curvy ass again, and my curvy foot will have a meeting with your fat ass. And I didn’t do shit to the controls.”

A quick snort and eye roll, and then he was backing up, retreating out of Maya’s space. “Right. The ship just decided to change the allocations.”

“You have an Artificial Intelligence in there. She might have.” If Maya’s mind were trapped inside a tin can owned by Unth, she would have done anything she could to make him miserable. When Maya had taken this job, she’d been desperate to get off-station because Command was closing in, and there were nasty rumors about what Command soldiers did to colonists in areas they retook. The threat of rape had been the only motivation capable of getting her to work for the abrasive asshole.

“It would not,” Unth said, emphasizing the pronoun to make it perfectly clear he didn’t plan on thinking of The Tiamat as a person. “Or at least it wouldn’t unless you did something to convince it that you needed a longer shower. Have you been playing with the logic interface?”

Maya’s mouth fell open. Her hands were scarred. She had burn marks on her fingertips and a scar down her right leg where a nasty burn had gotten infected. Programmers were soft creatures who sat at desks, and Maya was the opposite with her broad shoulders and sharp hawk’s nose that made people describe her as handsome rather than pretty. “I’m a fucking welder. What do I know about logical interfaces? If the ship has moved resources, it might be her way of calling you an asshole. Instead of yelling at me, stop slamming her hatches and letting her lubrication systems go dry, and maybe she’ll give you water for a shower.”

Unth threw his hands in the air. “What the fuck is it with women and their habit of assuming everything has feelings?”

“I don’t know, maybe because we’re more logical and know what the fuck ‘Intelligence’ means in Artificial Intelligence.”

“The intelligence is in the computer, shit-for-brains, not in the physical structure of the ship.”

Maya laid the sarcasm on thick. “And AI systems are renowned for their logic and rational decisions.” Even Command and the rebels, as hard up as they were for ships, refused to use the few old AI systems that were still flying. If either side got ahold of Tiamat, they would strip her down for parts and dismantle the computer system rather than risk flying a ship that might randomly decide on her own to stop in the black and run diagnostics. “I love this old ship, but she makes her own choices, and I’m pretty sure she hates your guts. All your half-ass repairs and lack of maintenance to her physical structure might have something to do with it.”

“AI are all bugfuck nuts, but that has to do with faulty logic lines, not whether their little feelings are hurt because the captain doesn’t buy them fucking flowers.”

Unth’s disrespect made Maya wince. Tiamat was a good little ship, and she was equipped with internal sensors. While Maya wasn’t a programmer, she had grown up on ships and had a ship-born superstition against insulting ships, and when the ship in question was an AI, that was doubled. However Unth didn’t even notice her discomfort. He kept right on ranting. “The computer doesn’t give a damn what happens in the hydraulic lift, and if you can’t handle the equipment, lube the systems yourself.”

“I have been for a month now,” Maya shouted. What sort of captain didn’t notice his crew doing maintenance? And with only three of them on the damn ship, he couldn’t claim there were too many people to keep track of. “Running lube into heavy lifters is something I can do; reprogramming a logic interface isn’t. Try that logic on for size.”

The whole time Maya had been shouting, Unth had been turning steadily redder. When she finished, he poked a finger in her direction. “The next time we get to dock, you’re gone.” He spun around and nearly tripped over Maya’s toolbox.

“Good luck finding another welder for the salvage jobs,” she shouted to his retreated back. “No one wants to run the frontlines, and they really don’t want to do it while working for you.”

“I’m resetting the resource allocation program,” he shouted back before he ducked through an open airlock door.

“Knock yourself out,” she screamed after him. Asshole. Maya slammed her toolbox shut and sat on it, her legs shaking from the confrontation.  She hated fighting, fucking hated it. The only thing she hated more was getting walked on. Maybe if Unth stopped at a dock far enough away from the front lines, she should jump ship. She rubbed her thighs and tried to settle her breathing. She also hated change, and as bad as Unth was, he had never gotten physical and another captain might.

“At least I have a choice,” she said softly. She didn’t have the one choice she wanted, but her skills gave her more options that most people in this cursed universe. She looked at the soft lighting that ran around the room—that’s where Tiamat’s sensors were. “I’m sorry old girl. If I could fly, I’d steal you from that asshole. He doesn’t deserve you,” she whispered. “Unfortunately my flying sucks so bad I’d steer you into a sun.” If she could pilot a ship, she would have her pick of ships, assuming Command or the rebels didn’t kidnap her and make her join the war. She could make enough money to buy her own ship.

“Maybe in another reality, I could buy you,” she said as she reached over to pat Tiamat’s wall. “But in this reality, I’d send you straight into a sun’s gravity well. You wouldn’t like that.” She frowned as she thought about what Unth had said. Technically, an Artificial Intelligence was computer based only, but many of the programmers used human interfaces and neural recordings to bolster straight-forward computer programming. And human brains were used to having bodies. 

“I wonder if you can feel the ship or if you would feel the damage if I ran us into a sun.” Maya felt a little ill at the thought. “The first time my aunt tried to teach me how to steer a ship, I ran into the only asteroid within a quarter light year,” she confessed to the little ship. “I damaged the communication array because my cousins hadn’t retracted it. I think they assumed I could miss one rock in the middle of nowhere. Not so much.” She gave a wry smile and shrugged as she remembered her embarrassment. She’d begged her aunt to give her just one chance to learn navigation systems. And one chance had been all she’d gotten.

“If I did that with your right underbelly panel damaged, you’d have a atmosphere leak for sure, and that’s assuming you didn’t suffer a full blowout.” Maya got up and headed back to the H-conduit. If she wanted to make a profit off her ship’s shares, she would have to get some of this junk turned back into serviceable spare parts. The fact that she was so good at fabrication and repair made her suspect Unth would never fire her, even if he threatened on a regular basis.

She got back on the dolly and rolled underneath where the cracked conduit allowed part of the metal to sag away from the rest. She pulled the protective cover over her and started her welder. Like the ship, it was old and the power source rumbled as the sound of the arc weld echoed in the confined space under the conduit.

With the dull roar of the torch filling her ears, she felt freer to talk without being overheard. “Unth should get you in for a refit. He’s a fucking moron who doesn’t appreciate how much life you still have in you. I could redo your underbelly given a few replacement parts and some time in dock. You’d look a lot better with some new siding on the old house.”

Some days Maya suspected she was getting space sick, even with Hiram and Unth around. “I’ve been out here too long. My best friend is a computer, and I just keep on having conversations with her even though she never talks back. My aunt always said that AI systems need to be entertained. She says the only ones she knows of that work long-term are ones with kids on them. She thinks it’s the amount of time kids spend playing games and how they are always looking to download the lastest shit from the nets when the ship docks.”

She brought the filler rod up and braced the sagging section with her knee before she started welding. “Do you get bored? It’s not like there’s much to do out there, other than duck Command patrols or rebels.” Maya didn’t ask the ship, but she wondered if Tiamat feared the combatants and feared one of them would confiscate her and rip her apart into spare parts. That might make her think twice about pissing off Unth.

“This part of space would be a lot better off if both sides dropped dead,” she said sadly. “But then, without dark ships out here, what would we salvage?” Sadly, the war had been pure gold for certain professions. In the past, Maya would have been limited to the docks, working for a shipyard or repair service. But the war meant that each side would pick off ships and run, leaving the dark hulls of dead ships floating through the black. With the right instruments, a captain could find those hulks. That’s when Maya stepped in. Hiram would strip the computers of any information that hadn’t been secured or destroyed and Maya could start ripping out any spare parts. 

It was a dangerous job, but Maya did enjoy it. She liked that she could see the results of her work immediately. She liked seeing the crack slowly fill as the arc welder passed over the damage. The H-conduit would be stronger when she finished. The rest of the conduit could fall apart, but the two pieces she joined would hold. 

That was the easy part. She could weld a conduit or fabricate an exhaust bypass vent. But everything else was just so hard. People always expected more than she knew how to deliver. She was so damn tired of every other part of life being so fucking hard. She turned off her welder, pushed her protective equipment to the side and lay under the conduit, staring at the textured metal as tears ran down her face.