Swift pretends she’s not interested in the training process when she knows I’m looking at her, but I catch her curiosity out of the corner of my eye. Whenever I change around the patterning in the LED beacon, I can feel her leaning over to get a good look at what I’m keying in. She reminds me of a cat who used to lurk around the pens back home. He’d try to steal fish right out of our feed buckets, but if you ever caught him looking at one, he’d feign disinterest and start preening himself. Swift’s not out for fish, though—she’s just morbidly curious about the way a Reckoner becomes a fighting machine.

“You can ask questions, you know?” I tell her one afternoon while I work with Bao on the “stay” command. It’s slow going because he’s already got it so ingrained into his system that any LED signal means come to the ship and get fed. I have to start getting him to notice the nuances of the lighting patterns.

Swift ruffles her side-swept hair and folds her arms. “Fine. Why’s he such a slow learner?”

“’Cause he’s a terrapoid. His brain’s not as suited for this kind of stuff. Anything reptilian is a brute-force sort of animal. Cetoids are much faster—mammalian Reckoners have more logical capabilities. And … ”

Swift catches my pause and mulls it over before prompting, “And?”

“Simioids,” I tell her, and even saying the word brings a shudder up my spine. “Simioids are the fastest learners, but that’s what makes them so terrifying. You guys ever run afoul of one?”

“I don’t even know what ‘simioid’ means.”

I kick on the LEDs with the “stay” patterning and Bao wavers, still puzzling whether he’s supposed to keep where he is or come in. “Monkey-type. They’re much smaller animals, but their intelligence is through the roof. I never want to be a simioid trainer. It’s the one type of Reckoner I’ve always refused to work with.”

“How come?”

“People aren’t even sure if we should be making simioids. They’ve been shown to have really advanced language capabilities, and there’s an argument in the Reckoner development community that by making them, we’re engineering a new intelligent species. We’ve had a few simioids in our pens, and … I don’t know, you look in their eyes and you can see it. See them as thinking beings. And it’s never felt right to me.”

Swift scoffs. Her hand drops to the pistol in her holster, and I steel myself. She always touches the gun right before she starts a fight.

“What?” I ask. There’s no avoiding a spat, but if I play along, maybe we won’t waste much daylight on it.