“Living things,” Niko said automatically. And then, “Oh,” as she looked around her at the ship’s body. “I guess the Thing is pretty unique. So maybe they won’t wipe your memories after all, Thing. They’ll just store you at dock forever. Take you for ten-minute flights to keep you tuned, once a week.”

The ship did not consider that acceptable. Sitting at dock was boring. It was created to fly, to explore, to travel. To never do that again would be to become something that it did not want to become.

Normally it was conscious of its entire body, but currently the room where Lolola resided was a void. She’d turned off all the internal sensors, and the ship’s only knowledge of what she was doing came from her manipulation of its controls. It had been trying to circumvent her commands by bringing in a biomachine designed for maintenance and cleaning, but she had amended them so thoroughly that the ship could not perceive the way through the thicket of prohibitions.

“I wish to avoid this fate,” it told its passengers.

It paused, considering what to say, working through thousands of additional permutations. It was not sure what would yield the best result. Everything seemed so tenuous and unpredictable in this new set of circumstances.

It supposed that part of what it was feeling was fear and anxiety, but it was not sure how to untangle them. It could tell that the emotions were moving through its body, making its systems less efficient, less controllable, and it forced calm on itself, synthesizing a basic sedative and releasing it into its system at slow, judicious intervals.

The emotions were still there, but they were distanced now, and easier to bear. It thought about that word and the implication that emotions were a physical weight. It did seem that way, but it was not true. It filed the paradox away, and then worried that it would lose all the things it had recorded in order to replay them at leisure.

“Do you suppose we could try talking to Lolola?” Dabry said almost wistfully. “It’s been so long since a situation actually got resolved by talking, sometimes I forget it’s a possibility.”

“Can you open a communications channel to her?” Niko asked.

“I am attempting to do so, but she is not responding.”

“Is she incapacitated? Is she capable of responding?”

“Judging from other commands being inputted, yes. She is simply ignoring your request.”

Niko looked at the others. “Well, at least we tried.”

“That is being uncertain consolation,” Skidoo said.

Lassite sat still, listening to words he’d heard spoken in dreams. Oh so perilous, this branch of the path! His tongue flickered and he could taste the others’ fear in the moist, too-heavy air.

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