2.0

And then what?” Boz MacLeod asked. She wasn’t judging. Not yet, anyway. She was simply curious. She fished a cigarette and lighter out of her top pocket. Ravi’s gaze flicked instinctively upward. Boz chuckled. “Sensors have been dead for years. No one’s going to know.”

Ravi had no doubt his cousin was right. This was Boz’s bolt-hole, after all, long vanished from the ship’s specifications and impossible to find unless you knew it was here. High up in the Fiji Wheel, it must once have been a control room. Charred deck plates spoke to some long-ago catastrophe. Control panels gaped empty, their innards gutted for parts. The seats that remained were just bolted-down frames, their upholstery burned away in whatever disaster had happened here. Various flavors of graffiti, much of it BonVoy, glowered from the bulkheads. The graffiti was old, though. Judging from the slogans, Fourth Gen. Maybe even Third. Crates of contraband that Boz had “acquired” through various trades were stuffed carelessly into the corners.

Boz pressed the tip of her cigarette against the arcing electricity of her lighter and took a long drag. The tobacco glowed red. A wisp of blue smoke spiraled toward the ceiling. Ravi thought about the overworked air filters and winced. His cousin, entirely unfazed by the damage she was doing, just stared at him, waiting for an answer.

“Nothing,” he admitted at last. “I kind of freaked out, and when I looked out the porthole again, she was gone. Nothing there but vacuum. I fired up every external sensor I could find. Zip. Nada. Nothing.”

The beginnings of a smile quirked at his cousin’s lips.

“But you were in the middle of punking that handsome classmate of yours. So . . . what about the recording?”

Ravi cursed himself for all kinds of a fool. He’d opened up his camera and taped the whole thing, expecting to catch Ansimov in a full-on panic. He still had the data.

“Link me in,” Boz demanded.

With a literal blink of an eye, Ravi flashed her a key. Inside his head, he could feel her settling in beside him. He played the tape.

Nothing. Well, nothing that showed the girl. There was a camera’s-eye view painted across the inside of his eyelids. It floated to the outer door and looked out the porthole. Then everything blurred as he spun away. It was a full minute before the video stabilized and he returned to the porthole for another look.

But all the tape showed was an anteroom, an airlock, and a spectacular view of the ship. There was no sign of the girl.

Boz slid away, breaking the connection.

“Maybe you imagined it. You were all alone in the back of beyond. Easy enough to get freaked out, you know?”

Ravi nodded, reluctantly. The tape didn’t lie, and there was no sign of the girl. And no one—no one—could live in hard vacuum without a spacesuit. It couldn’t have been real.

And yet . . .

“Have you told anyone else?” Boz asked.

“Not a soul. Apart from you, obviously.”

“Good call.” She looked at him hesitantly, touched a hand to his wrist. “Are you cool? Do you need to see someone, you know, professional?”

“I’m not mad.”

“No. You’re just seeing things.”

A wry chuckle escaped into the open, despite Ravi’s best efforts to restrain it.

“I think I’m just trashed,” he confessed. “Chen Lai’s riding us pretty hard. He’s got Braking Day marked on his schedule with a big, giant X, and Archie help anyone who sards up his countdown.” He flashed his cousin a brittle smile. “A good night-cycle’s sleep and it’s all good.”

“Awesome.” Boz stood up suddenly, with enough force to float off the deck.

“You know it’s only half a g up here,” Ravi mocked. “You need to keep your excitement under control. Unless, of course, you want to smack your head on the ceiling.”

Boz, who had already drifted back down, spared him a pitying look.

“You need to live a little. Better to hit the ceiling now and again than spend your life welded to the deck.” Her eyes took on a mischievous glint. “Besides, I am excited.”

Boz was the proud owner of a scuffed brown jacket that pre-dated the Launch—or so she claimed. She also said it was made of a blood-soaked material called leather, which, knowing Boz, was a bare-faced lie. Eyes gleaming, Boz reached inside of said garment and pulled out a palm-sized metal sphere, lovingly hand-painted in yellow and black.

“What is it?” Ravi asked, suddenly curious.

“This is BozBall. My new little helper. It’s why I asked you up here.” She dropped the metal sphere onto the deck plates. “Go fetch,” she ordered. She only used her voice, Ravi noticed. There was no accompanying burst of code.

For several long moments, the “BozBall” just sat there, a yellow-black lump of useless. A series of snarky comments arranged themselves on Ravi’s tongue, ready to jump into the open. Before that happened, however, the little ball started to spin.

Ravi felt something tickling his implants.

“Is that thing scanning me?”

Boz said nothing.

The ball rolled across the deck until it bumped into a couple of crates. Ravi’s eyes widened in surprise as the homemade drone sprouted a bunch of spidery legs and started to climb. It reached the top of the crates, jumped onto the ceiling, crossed a good chunk of it upside down, unscrewed a rusted ventilation grille, and disappeared inside.

Ravi turned to look at Boz and clapped appreciatively.

“Wow. That’s pretty . . .”

His voice trailed off. He’d expected Boz to have that slightly vacant expression people wear when they’re remoting a gadget, but Boz was just grinning manically. She was fully “present.”

“Isn’t it great?” she asked enthusiastically. Her grin, if anything, grew even wider.

Ravi stopped paying attention. His own expression, he knew, was not so much vacant as pained. He almost groaned with effort, peering into every corner of the nearby hive. Boz was there, her presence a small eddy in the current of data flowing through the ship. But the eddy should have been bigger. More complex. There should have been tendrils of information—of code—flowing between her and the BozBall. There weren’t any. In fact, no matter how hard he looked, there was no sign of the BozBall at all.

It wasn’t part of the hive.

He stopped peering electronically and used his eyes as nature intended. To glare at his cousin.

“What in Archie’s name do you think you’re doing?” he yelled at her. “This isn’t a twenty-liter fine and a couple of sols’ torpor, Boz! You could get recycled!”

Boz’s only response was a dismissive wave of the hand.

“I’m serious,” Ravi persisted. “That . . . whatever you call it, is a full-blown LOKI. ShipSec’ll have your hide!”

Boz burst out laughing.

“It’s just a bunch of algos, Rav. It’s not like it can pass a Turing test or anything.”

“And you think ShipSec will care? It’s a machine. It’s not part of the hive. It thinks on its own.” He ticked off each charge on a slightly unsteady finger and gazed earnestly at his cousin. “It’s a LOKI, Boz. They will mulch you.”

A flicker of doubt surfaced briefly on Boz’s face. Briefly. She was grinning again, reckless as ever.

“Yeah, well. First, they have to catch me.” She glanced back up at the duct, where the BozBall had reappeared. There was a soft whirring as it reattached the rusty grille. Boz’s grin grew still wider. “And if they do, it’ll be worth it.”

Ravi was about to point out that nothing was worth getting mulched for, when BozBall arrived at its creator’s feet. Delicate limbs held up a small, rectangular package wrapped in purple foil.

Ravi knew his mouth was hanging open, but he couldn’t quite figure out how to close it.

“That cannot be real,” he said at last.

“Oh, but it totally is. Stashed it here last week—without BozBall, mind you, and yet he found it in no time at all.”

“Where’d you . . .”

“Don’t ask. Eat!” Boz took the package from BozBall, tore it open, and handed half the contents to Ravi. The warm aroma of chocolate filled the room. And not the ship-made stuff that tasted like denatured cellulose. This was different; a cathartic symphony of syrupy fragrance, filling his head with half-octaves of sweetness and a complex, organic bassline. This was real chocolate. From Earth.

And it was 132 years old.

With trembling fingers, Ravi broke off a small square and took the tiniest of bites.

The flavors exploded in his mouth like a bomb.