“All right, but that’s going to be dangerous. The AI is still out of commission.”

“Do you know how ship AIs are built?”

“Let’s say I don’t.”

“Conceptually, it’s built to resemble the human brain.”

“Let’s say I don’t know anything about that either.”

“You have two brains, conceptually. One is an automatic brain that deals with breathing, heartbeat, digestion, all the neural functions that you don’t think about. Then you have the new brain, the neocortex, which lies on the automatic brain like a blanket. Your humanity lies here – your morality, your refinement. Do you follow?”

“Just about.”

“If you have a bad accident and go into a coma, the neocortex is out of action and your automatic functions continue. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.”

“The Ragtime is similar. The innermost part of a Pentagram is the automatic functions. Layered onto that is the ‘personality’. What’s happening now is that all the functions that give the AI its personality are gone. The automatic AI, the last backup, is still working. It’s coded in Pentagram hardware. It is rudimentary and obeys instructions.”

“Shell’s instructions.”

“Yes.”

“But what about the robots?” asks Fin.

“The AI instructs the robots; so if it is out of commission, the robots will be too.”

Fin is confused. “But they’re not. They’re trying to kill us.”

“Not exactly. They seem to be trying to impede us, which is not the same thing.”

“Impede us from what?” More important, Fin thinks, why?

Shell drifts in, kicks herself in the direction of the cupola and watches planetrise. Fin may have heard a sigh. She drops back down.

She faces Salvo. “You said something about a spacewalk?”

They all watch the feed from the external camera. There is still debris stuck to the hull, and the stump of the long-range antenna is present, but no dish.

“This really isn’t the time for EVA,” says Shell. “The ship is too twitchy for my liking.”

“I’ll do it,” says Lawrence. Does he sound cheerful?

Shell looks to Joké with slightly raised eyebrows, as if to say, Are you cool with this? Joké doesn’t respond. To Fin she seems oddly unconcerned about her father’s welfare, but theirs isn’t a typical relationship.

“It makes sense, Action Governor,” says Joké. She drops a head on his shoulder. “You’ve probably clocked more spacewalk hours than all of us combined.”

“You can see some of the free panels are from the interstellar shielding. They had to have gone first before the section broke away,” says Salvo.

“You want me to bring all that shit in?” asks Larry.

“No, just tell me what’s out there.”

The camera has limits, as does the Big Dumb Arm. Salvo is right.