“I– no.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “At least, I don’t think so. My mind isn’t clear.” She tried to will herself to remember, but only found flashes again: the gleam of metal, a voice shouting hoarsely, the clatter of running feet. Her memories were fragmented and unhelpful. Very well. What could not be changed must be accommodated. “If I am not in quarantine, why are you speaking to me remotely?”

“I’m not, technically. You’re in a ship, and I am the ship, or at least, the ghost in the machine. They didn’t have… things like me when you left on your journey. I’m an artificial mind. I handle everything on the ship that the biological crew can’t, or won’t, or would botch too badly if they tried.”

Elena sat back down. “Wait. You’re an artificial intelligence? True AI?”

“Yes… but I might claim that even if I were just a convincing imitation, wouldn’t I? I’m sorry no one else is here to greet you. You woke up sooner than expected, and the crew is having an almost-all-hands meeting. I say almost because our engineer is still trying to figure out what happened to the engines of your ship. The Anjou, was it? There were some very peculiar modifications made, to the hull and to the engines and navigational systems. Do you have any information about that?”

Elena put a hand to her head. There was another flash of something – multi-jointed arms moving in a blur, ripping off pieces of the Anjou’s fuselage and welding on seemingly pointless blades and fans of metal. And something else, a pop, and a hole opening up in the void, ragged and irregular… “I’m sorry. I’m disoriented.”

“Probably space madness,” Shall said.

Elena hugged herself. “What do you mean?”

“Sorry.” Improbably, the computer coughed. “That was supposed to be funny. It’s sort of an in-joke among the crew. Any time someone does something strange or ridiculous, we blame it on space madness. The more deadpan, the better.”

“You’re an artificial intelligence, and you tell jokes?”

“Joking is essential to my functions. The earliest halfway successful attempts at AI were pure machine intelligences, but the problem was, they didn’t have much interest in talking to humans – no more than humans have in talking to random chains of hydrocarbons, say. People used to worry about artificial minds trying to enslave humanity, when in reality, such minds pay less attention to humans than humans do to slime mold. Those AI had a tendency to cease communication entirely, absorbed in incomprehensible abstractions. The usual shorthand explanation is, they’re off somewhere in virtual space, writing poetry in binary – which I suppose would at least be fairly easy to rhyme.”

“You aren’t very funny,” Elena observed, after deciding the issue wasn’t her own cognitive deficit.