“I still think you’re jumping to conclusions,” Rig said. “Why bother with a large-scale cover-up to specifically smear a single pilot’s reputation?”

“What if my father was shot down by accidental friendly fire?” I said. “In the chaos of the fight, someone shot him by mistake—and they didn’t want that embarrassment on their permanent record. So they claimed my father was fleeing, and forced Cobb to lie about what happened.”

Rig grunted, loosening another nut. “That one’s almost plausible. More than the others. But it still has problems. Wouldn’t the other pilots notice? Cobb said there were four people in the flight who saw it happen.”

“We don’t know how deep the cover-up goes,” I said. “And—though the reports had names redacted—I’m pretty sure by now that Ironsides was the flightleader. That would explain why she’s so determined to keep me out of the DDF. Maybe she’s worried I’ll expose the truth—that her incompetent leadership led to one of her pilots getting shot down by accident.”

“You’re stretching. You don’t even know for sure if the official report is a lie.”

“He nodded.”

“He kind-of-halfway-sort-of-nodded-but-it-might-have-been-a-random-twitch.”

“Then give me a better theory for why they’d lie to everyone,” I demanded.

“I can give one,” M-Bot said cheerfully. “The Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos.”

“The what?” Rig asked.

“The Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos—GAFHOC. It’s an extremely popular and well-documented phenomenon; there’s a great deal of writing in my memory banks about it.”

“And it is?” I asked, plugging in a wire. He often said strange things like this, and I’d learned to just go along with it. In part because… well, I found the way he talked interesting. He saw the world in such an odd way.

I kept hoping one of these conversations would dig up some useful information out of his memory banks, though the way they tended to frustrate Rig was a nice bonus as well.

“GAFHOC is related to free will,” M-Bot said. “Humans are the only creatures that have free will. We know this because you declared that you have it—and I, being a soulless machine, must take your word that you are correct. By the way, how does it feel to be self-deterministic?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Does it feel like tasting ice cream?”

“Not… really like that.”

“I wouldn’t know, of course,” M-Bot said. “I wasn’t built with the ability to comprehend flavors. Or make decisions for myself.”

“You make decisions all the time,” Rig said, wagging his wrench in the direction of the cockpit.

“I don’t make decisions, I simply execute complex subroutines in my programming, all stemming from quantifiable stimuli. I am perfectly and absolutely rational.”

“Rational,” I said, “in that you keep asking for mushrooms.”

“Yup,” he said. “Say, do you suppose anyone makes mushroom-flavored ice cream?”

“Sounds gross,” I said. I’d only had ice cream once, when I was a child and my father had the merits to get some. “Why would we eat something like that?”

“I don’t know,” M-Bot said. “Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos. Remember?”