Crunches and shrieks buffeted the Magellan LLC smartship as it plunged into Enceladus’s kilometers-thick ice crust, making their way to the subsurface ocean and the rival LuxeSpace corporation’s station situated there. Warning signals flashed through Jarrell and his fellow shipminds’ readouts, but they followed their orders and continued inward. They’d long since learned to ignore such dangers—the digitized brains of former human corporate-soldiers that controlled smartships could afford to take risks and go places traditionally-crewed spaceships wouldn’t dare.

Galvan and Sitwat shifted the engine thrust and angle, adjusting their trajectory. Working in tandem to control power and navigation, those two would ensure the smartship broke through the ice at a precise forty-nine-degree approach to the LuxeSpace research station. Meanwhile, Jarrell spun out potential battle scenarios as the trio of shipminds continued through the ice.

Based on the briefing packet the team had been beamed en route to Enceladus, Jarrell anticipated between one- and two-dozen autonomously guided torpedoes would be launched from the station the instant the smartship entered the ocean. Mines would already be converging on their ingress point, but the ice preceding the smartship should detonate those before they could do any damage, provided his tactical predictions were accurate. He ran through the weapons systems readiness checks again.

The roar and crackle of ancient ice shattering around them minutely changed in tone, the reverberations lessening in length and delay. They were almost through. Jarrell switched on his viewing ports.

Suddenly, he was in space, the smartship surrounded by vacuum, black extending in all directions. No, not all directions. Starboard and slightly to nadir, Enceladus hung, white and stippled as an egg. And around the moon, smartships battled with ground-based defenses. Glowing shells streaked past another Magellan LLC smartship, one he didn’t recognize, an older model badly in need of retrofitting. Confusion shading toward panic, he tried to ping the smartship’s ID, but couldn’t. What was happening? Seconds ago, he’d been encased in kilometers of ice.

Flashes on Enceladus’s surface marked shots from ultraprecise lasers. As Jarrell watched, one connected with the Magellan smartship’s navigation shipmind node, and the ship squid-inked out of the battle, weapons deploying in a frantic cloud as automated systems took over and sent the suddenly ineffectual smartship hurtling away before the two remaining shipminds could be killed.

Jarrell tried to initiate his own ultraprecise lasers, but nothing reacted. It was as if he was watching the battle play out in a simulation or memory, but their approach hadn’t gone like this. They’d hung back while drones pulled fire from the moon before slipping in low on the opposite side. This battle had never happened.

Their smartship spun to port, firing kinetic weapons at an enemy smartship as it appeared from behind Enceladus’s far side. The enemy smartship seemed familiar, though Jarrell couldn’t say why—maybe the deep rust-colored gouge that stretched diagonally across its zenith like an appendectomy scar. Jarrell remembered his own appendectomy scar, back before he’d been digitized and uploaded. But he couldn’t dwell on the past. More important now was that they were rotating the wrong way.

“Sitwat! Galvan!” he shouted, flaring his own consciousness into their own, demanding their attention. No response. “Kanya! Miranda!”

Without so much as a stutter in his visual ports, Jarrell was back in the ice and then under it as the ship exploded into the subsurface ocean. It left him no time to think, to wonder, or worry about what had just happened. He’d thought he was in space, but now he was back where he was supposed to be, and he couldn’t dwell on the disparity, so Jarrell did what he did best: he acted and reacted, he spotted patterns, he kept the smartship two steps ahead of their opponent.

He directed tactics and weapons on a smartship belonging to one of the largest and most powerful nation-corps in the solar system, and he did it with aplomb. He dodged and aimed and attacked and—once he’d dealt sufficient damage but before the ship had taken anything serious—retreated.

As the LuxeSpace station collapsed behind them, Jarrell and his fellow shipminds bore up through the ice and left Enceladus behind. Another battle won for their corporate board and shareholders.

• • • •

One of the many benefits of smartships was that they didn’t need to dock between missions. Aside from occasionally needing raw materials for their ammunition manufactories, smartships didn’t need to dock at all, traveling the long empty space between engagements. Even the travel time was shorter without having to worry about the limits of human endurance under g-forces.

Still, there were limits. Most of Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan’s work during these periods was automated, leaving them plenty of empty time to fill. They had access to entertainment archives, but only those that Magellan’s subsidiaries held copyright on, and Jarrell discovered that neither books nor movies nor music nor anything else had the same appeal when it occurred on the same circuits as all his other thoughts. There was something about it that was lost when it was no longer external, when it was dumped directly into his mind.

Instead, Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan spent their time talking, exploring each other’s memories, sharing them with the perfect recall of their now-computerized brains.

Sitwat initiated this communion shortly after the attack on Enceladus, eager as a child being told a favorite story. “What do you guys think—can we do the zip-tag championship and prom? Best day of your life, right Omar?”

It was indeed the best day of Jarrell’s life, and under any other circumstances he’d happily relive it. Except he wanted to keep the strange occurrence at Enceladus a secret and knew it would be impossible if they connected.

What he’d experienced didn’t feel like a dream—he lived those moments. To be jarred out of his own experience like that could indicate a deeper problem, something in his mind’s connection to the ship or a glitch in his digitization or upload. Then again, perhaps it was normal—he’d only been a shipmind for about three years and sometimes it seemed like every day he discovered something new about this mode of existence. In its own way, it was a little like being born again. Growing up the first time was plenty scary and confusing.

“I think I need a minute,” he said. The disappointment that emanated from Sitwat and—to a lesser extent—Galvan, cut him. But that disappointment quickly turned to concern.

“What’s the matter, Omar?” Sitwat asked.

“Something happened at Enceladus,” Galvan said. It wasn’t a question.

Of course he couldn’t hide anything from them—these women knew Jarrell better than anyone ever had in his life. Better than his parents, even better than Tila. He opened up, shared what he’d seen, and asked if either of them had experienced any similar issues with memory or seeing events that hadn’t occurred, unsure what answer to hope for.

“No way,” Sitwat said. “That sounds like something you should talk to corporate about.”

“Absolutely do not tell anyone at corporate about this,” Galvan said.

Jarrell didn’t want to contact anyone at the home office. Their boss was a pleasant enough man named Xavier MacLeish, one of the myriad vice presidents, someone who clearly toed the company line. Better to solve this problem on his own.

“What are you talking about?” Sitwat said. “We have to tell corporate. Mr. MacLeish will know what to do. For all we know, this happens all the time.”

“And no one bothered to warn us?” Galvan said.

“Maybe they forgot,” Sitwat suggested half-heartedly.

“We don’t know what this is,” Jarrell said. “I need time to figure it out. Please don’t say anything.”

“If it’s a malfunction, we have to report it,” Sitwat said. “It’s best practices.”

“Stop it,” Galvan said. “What do you think happens if Jarrell’s malfunctioning?”

“Corporate will repair him,” Sitwat answered.

Jarrell didn’t think any of them believed that. All three of them knew precisely what would happen if Jarrell was malfunctioning. If one of them was compromised and decommissioned, all three would be. Their minds were connected; sharing went both ways. Smartship connections weren’t merely an efficient and effective form of battle collaboration.

They were a suicide pact.

• • • •

They couldn’t travel through space alone with nothing but their own thoughts. They’d go crazy. After a day absorbing and analyzing their newly delivered intelligence on Thetis—their next target—Sitwat and Galvan invited Jarrell to share memories with them.

“I can’t,” he said. “What if I’m malfunctioning? I could infect you.”

“We can’t be here together and not connect, Omar,” Sitwat said. “It’s just weird. We’ll take the risk.”

If Jarrell had eyes, he’d cry. Until Sitwat invited him to connect, Jarrell hadn’t realized how terrified he was of losing that connection. Even so, Jarrell found himself unable to focus on any concrete memory. Instead, like an ember crackling off a fire, his concern and confusion ignited the flakes of dried-out memories from his pre-shipmind life. He had a body then, of course. Nothing special—a little under average height, a little under average weight, eyes set a little too far apart and too big for his face, giving him a look of perpetual astonishment. Once they’d gotten to know each other better, Tila would tease him about it. Walking into his apartment, saying she hadn’t thought she looked that good. Pointedly looking at him whenever a film or vid-serial sprung a twist. It took something he’d once felt self-conscious about and transformed it into a form of endearment, their inside joke.

Had the vision he’d had come from something he’d watched before? Could it be a mishmash of dream and reality? Hadn’t aspects of it resembled the attack on Ganymede that killed Tila? Lord knew he’d watched the vids countless times. It was what drove him to join the military in the first place. He’d been born and raised on a Magellan LLC branch office his whole life—he’d never even left Ganymede—and yet he’d never considered joining up for the war until a coalition of rival corps killed Tila.

That attack had been the turning point for his entire life, leading directly to this moment. Maybe his newly-wired brain created a scenario in which he’d tried to prevent the attack, an alternate history. Except the vision had been of an attack on Enceladus. None of it made sense.

Pondering the connections between the Enceladus vision and Tila’s death shoved the memories of her last day to the forefront of Jarrell’s consciousness, fragments of his own near-death interspersing. This had happened before when he became overwhelmed with emotion or was distracted. He cut the connection between his memories and his fellow shipminds.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to go there.” They’d shared their memories of pain and loss before, but always with warning.

“Don’t worry about it,” Galvan said sardonically. “It’s not like any of our flesh-lives have happy endings.”

While the three of them had followed different life paths, they all converged into one similar ending: military service, maiming or dismemberment, an offer from Magellan LLC to live again as a shipmind. Followed by waking up together and going back to war.

“You two really were in love,” Sitwat practically sighed. “Obviously you think about Tila all the time.”

He knew she believed this—Sitwat’s memories featured a string of romantic relationships during her pre-shipmind life, each flaring supernova bright and usually dying out as spectacularly and quickly. Yet, for all of them, their new relationship was closer than any they’d ever had before they were shipminds. There was no way around it.

“Maybe we could visit some of your memories,” he suggested to Galvan. “I’d love to see the boys.”

A little older than Jarrell and Sitwat had been when they’d been converted, Galvan was the only one of them who’d had children, two boys still living on Ceres as far as she knew—part of their corporate contract stipulated that shipminds sever contact with their previous lives. Operational security, trade secrets, protecting their own families by not tempting rival corporations to target them: Magellan LLC had a rebuttal for any argument.

They relived Galvan’s sons’ fifth birthday party—junk food and games and running children chased by exhausted parents. A life that Jarrell and Sitwat would never have now but that they enjoyed almost as much as if they’d experienced this themselves. It all felt so real.

Just like Jarrell’s vision at Enceladus. It intruded for a split second into the birthday party, and Galvan abruptly shut it down.

“You okay, Omar?”

“Sorry,” Jarrell responded. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Have there been more visions?” Galvan asked. “If it’s getting worse . . .” She left the implication hanging. If things kept progressing, Jarrell might grow beyond help.

“No more visions,” Jarrell assured them. “It must’ve been some glitch brought up by something to do with Enceladus. Some comms signal or something.”

“Omar,” Galvan said, “if anything happens, you need to tell us.”

“We can help you,” Sitwat said. “We’ll figure it out together. I swear that we won’t say anything to corporate. We’ll protect ourselves—all three of us.”

Everything Sitwat said was genuine, but Jarrell didn’t know if it was true. He still knew so little about being a shipmind, but he knew from his first life—all of them knew—that good intentions could just as easily lead to catastrophe.

Halfway to Thetis, Jarrell experienced another vision.

• • • •

From the black of space, Jarrell was thrust into a vision that placed him above Thetis, which bristled with defenses and colony hubs. From the intelligence data-packet that Magellan LLC supplied, Jarrell knew that this wasn’t merely a resource extraction operation—people lived here. Not just soldiers and instruments of the corporate war machine. Families. People in love. And yet Jarrell was locking on targets, moments from launching an attack.

Three more Magellan LLC smartships approached from disparate angles, creating a deadly field of fire. All his sensors and experience indicated it would be devastating. And Jarrell could do nothing, a passenger in his own consciousness, impotently watching the battle unfold.

Even though he couldn’t control what happened in the vision, Jarrell tried to assuage his guilt by reminding himself that the asteroid’s inhabitants were from LuxeSpace. Not the exact corporate state that decimated Ganymede, but the current enemy of Magellan. There was no doubt that they were responsible for countless deaths and untold destruction. No corporation was guiltless, no corporate citizen without blood on their hands. Jarrell repeated this to himself so much he almost believed it.

Missiles and torpedoes and laser fire erupted from cannons and portholes all along his hull. He dreaded seeing body parts float from the destroyed station into space. What exactly had the briefing materials shown? Was he only attacking military sectors? Surely nothing residential.

A mostly-finished communications tower jutted above the silver-gray basalt landscape. Scaffolded steel and titanium and massive solar panels. Satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms after heavy rain. By the time Jarrell was finished with it, it was a pile of rubble, scorched detritus floating away from the asteroid’s surface.

Had he focused his fire on the uninhabited area on purpose? Jarrell didn’t know—whatever the Jarrell of the vision thought, the Jarrell of now had no inkling—but he hoped so. Maybe he’d found a way to follow orders and inflict damage on LuxeSpace while sparing innocents. It was a comforting fiction, at least.

Whatever his intentions, the LuxeSpace defenders didn’t care. They fought back desperately with surface-based weaponry and drones and their own smartships. Only two of them—Magellan wouldn’t greenlight an offensive unless they were confident they’d outnumber the opposition—and they were outdated models, but they somehow still managed to outmaneuver Magellan’s ships.

One expertly slipped and darted between the Magellan smartships’ attacks, frustrating Jarrell with its wiliness. Like a boxer sneaking in a precise punch on a larger opponent, it fired an ultraprecise laser at a shipmind node. Based on the location, Jarrell guessed it was power. It was a direct hit. The smartship squid-inked away, and suddenly the odds were more even.

Though Galvan and Sitwat spun the ship and dropped closer to Thetis’s surface, before Jarrell could fire back, the LuxeSpace smartships had disabled both of his remaining allies, who squid-inked away in a burst of radiation and flak. At least most of the shipminds would survive, as well as the ships themselves. You didn’t get to be a nation-corp through wastefulness.

Nothing to do now but go down swinging. Jarrell would watch the Jarrell of his vision do whatever damage he could to the smartships and Thetis before he or Sitwat or Galvan was taken out.

“Let it fly, Omar,” Galvan said, voice cold as ice.

“It’s been an honor and pleasure, folks,” Sitwat added.

They angled the smartship—themselves—at the LuxeSpace ships. Jarrell prepped everything he had. Suddenly, everything rattled. Systems fritzed and spasmed on and off. Was it radiation from the squid-inking ships? Some new weapon that the LuxeSpace smartships or surface defenses deployed? Jarrell only knew he’d never experienced anything like it before.

“Navigation offline,” Sitwat informed him at the same time that Galvan said, “Engines are out.”

Jarrell, too, was powerless. Not merely the Jarrell that was watching. The Jarrell in the vision had no control over his weapons. They still worked—the watching Jarrell could see that—but he couldn’t connect to them. He had to assume Galvan and Sitwat were in the same predicament.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

No one answered.

Then someone did.

“—research shipminds. The history corporate’s—”

A feminine voice, staccato, words clipping in and out. It spoke directly into Jarrell’s mind, as if it were part of his own smartship. That wasn’t supposed to be possible.

An automated voice cut her off. “LuxeSpace shipmind, cease and desist your attack immediately. Attempting to override a combatant shipmind is a violation of the Meier–Lusk Convention, section—”

Was the automated voice part of Jarrell’s smartship in this vision? It certainly wasn’t him, Sitwat, or Galvan speaking. Impossibilities piled up. As real as the vision felt, it seemed less and less plausible. Even the field stars seemed slightly off-kilter in his sensors.

“—find you again,” the invading shipmind continued. “You need—get out. You don’t understand what—.”

Without warning, the female voice cut off completely and Jarrell’s ship squid-inked away. Again, he could do nothing but frustratedly watch as the automated systems took him away from the battle and the only other smartship he’d ever spoken to.

• • • •

The vision of the Thetis engagement had lasted so much longer than Jarrell’s first vision that when he woke back to reality it took him a long moment to remember where he was. Still traveling through space, days away from Thetis. Nothing he’d seen had actually occurred.

He didn’t want to tell Galvan and Sitwat. He considered hiding the truth but knew he couldn’t. Eventually, they would either connect and see his memory, or he would refuse to connect and that would be as good as an admission. But he couldn’t allow himself to connect to them, to actually share the vision.

“It’s for your own protection,” he said. “If there’s any chance I can keep from spreading this glitch to you, I have to take it. If corporate finds out, we can pretend you didn’t know. Say I hid it, refused to connect. You two can survive.”

“I think we’re past that,” Galvan said, but Jarrell wouldn’t budge. He felt hollow without the connection to Galvan and Sitwat, but if it protected them it was worth it.

Still, he wondered if he could take advantage of the visions somehow. LuxeSpace’s Thetis defenses as he’d seen them in the vision largely matched up with the intelligence reports and schematics he’d reviewed. Not exact, but couldn’t it be possible that he’d processed the intelligence and extrapolated something more accurate? Jarrell worried it over alone the rest of the long way to Thetis, and when they finally arrived to begin the battle—which to Jarrell felt more like rejoining it—he still hadn’t decided what to believe.

When he saw the asteroid’s defenses, he concluded that whatever he’d seen was real. It wasn’t a hallucination or dream, it was a premonition. The partially-constructed communications tower solidified the realization. Not as complete as he’d seen it—in fact, it looked like it had only been under construction for six months at most—but clearly the same tower.

In fact, most of the base was still under construction. Even some of the major defensive batteries. Jarrell’s smartship was coming under less fire than in his premonition. Even so, they should prepare themselves just in case.

“Sitwat, Galvan, be prepared to take evasive maneuvers. LuxeSpace should have two smartships hitting any second.”

“Intelligence doesn’t conform,” Galvan said. “No LuxeSpace smartships have been reported in or approaching the area.”

“Trust me.”

A pregnant pause before Galvan answered. “Preparing for evasive maneuvers.”

While Sitwat and Galvan waited for the supposed smartships to appear, Jarrell pummeled the base. As in his vision, he targeted military or otherwise minimally-staffed areas. He was a smartship weapons-and-tactics node; his purpose was to anticipate what the enemy would do and stop them from doing it. When he signed up with Magellan LLC defense forces, that was what he pledged his life for. Two lives, as it turned out.

Any second now, the LuxeSpace smartships would emerge from hiding, and Jarrell would be ready.

On the surface, the defenses quieted, either completely destroyed or with their crews retreated. The colony hubs remained intact. Jarrell had preserved as much life as possible. Technically, refraining from attacking non-combatant areas wasn’t disobeying orders.

They waited for a full minute in utter calm. To be anywhere but open space and experiencing such serenity was so unusual as to be unnerving. Another shoe could drop any moment. Finally, Sitwat said, “There’s no smartship, Jarrell. Can we go?”

“Hang on,” Jarrell said. “It’s coming.” But his confidence flagged.

“Connect,” Sitwat said. “Maybe we can help.”

“It’s out there,” Jarrell insisted. “It’s out there.” Though his words existed only inside the three shipminds, he pictured them traveling off into space, fading with distance, not echoing back because there was nothing there to reflect them.

“Omar?” Sitwat said. “We have to go. There’s nothing for us here.”

She and Galvan controlled where the smartship went; they didn’t need his acquiescence. He provided it anyway, and they left Thetis, back into empty space to await their next orders.

• • • •

When MacLeish communicated with the shipminds, they received a visual of him sitting in his office. Whether the image actually portrayed his office—or MacLeish, for that matter—was uncertain. The face he chose to show them was of a soft-featured dark-skinned man in his early fifties, usually but not always wearing round half-rimmed glasses. Always dressed in an impeccably tailored suit and wearing a tie with a knot so intricate it gave Jarrell heart palpitations imagining the number of steps to achieving it. Growing up, it was drummed into Jarrell and everyone else on Ganymede that this sort of high-ranking corporate image indicated that the person deserved your respect. And that they could extract it from you if you declined to provide it willingly.

That MacLeish spoke with an avuncular bonhomie only served to reinforce the power behind the politeness. “Another successful mission,” he began, shortly after Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan had left Thetis, meandering in the general direction of Magellan’s Phobos headquarters while they waited for orders. “Another objective achieved as desired. It’ll take years for LuxeSpace to get their Thetis operation up and running again. If we’re right, they’ll cut their losses and sell off development rights. You three have made the shareholders and board very happy.”

“Do we get a bonus?” Galvan asked dryly.

MacLeish laughed, the time delay as the signal traveled to Phobos and back making it sound canned. Or maybe it was just fake. “What can you give as a bonus after you’ve already gifted someone a second life? Digitizing human consciousness isn’t cheap, my friend.”

They all knew this, of course. When Jarrell was lying on his deathbed, lower half of his body sheared off by a segment of hull that speared through the bridge of the ship he’d been stationed on, the Magellan LLC rep outlined precisely how expensive. A procedure normally only available to the richest people in the solar system, offered to the lowly-but-talented combat tactician Jarrell if—instead of living in a quasi-synthetic body like those people—he allowed himself to be implanted into a smartship. A chance to live on and keep up his fight against the corporations who’d murdered Tila? Why wouldn’t he leap at the opportunity?

“LuxeSpace had a good deal invested there,” Galvan said. “Lots of construction. Plus, the colony habs are largely still intact. It’ll be a process for them to evacuate everyone.”

MacLeish waved off her concern. “Leave that to us. They’ve had other setbacks. This straw will snap that camel’s spine, believe you me.” He leaned back and steepled his fingers. “Now, how about we roundtable each shipmind’s priorities from the mission, how they were accomplished, and where we can look for improvement? Captain Sitwat, would you like to go first?”

They were all three of them captains; MacLeish was the only one who ever used the title, and even then, only during debriefing.

Sitwat and Galvan described their role in the battle, mentioning Jarrell only in regards to his trajectory and speed requests. Neither referenced the nonexistent enemy smartships.

Jarrell then ran through his experience of the battle, as circumspect as possible.

MacLeish nodded when Jarrell was finished. “And about those colony habs,” he said. “How is it that they all avoided your attack? It seems unlikely such a thing would be coincidental.”

Jarrell had prepared for this question. “I prioritized based on immediate danger and which parts of the installation would be most difficult to replace. Even as fast as shipminds process information, the heat of battle means I sometimes have to make multiple such decisions without immediately considering Magellan’s overall corporate objectives.”

“Fair enough,” MacLeish said. He seemed about to end the debrief when he said, casually, not even looking at the screen, “Although that delay before you departed seemed to provide enough time for further damage. Especially given, as you say, your rapid processing capabilities.”

“Simply additional tactical assessment,” Jarrell replied, as studiedly casual as MacLeish.

“Is that so,” MacLeish said. “Captains Galvan, Sitwat, you can confirm?”

Time froze as Jarrell waited for their answers. Except didn’t he know what they would say? They’d deny any problems. They’d save his life—for now—but in doing so they’d be as compromised as he was.

“There is one thing,” Jarrell blurted before either of his friends could cover for him and doom themselves. “I’ve experienced what I believe to be . . . premonitions.”

MacLeish was silent for much longer than the time delay accounted for. “Go on,” he finally said.

Jarrell did. Rationally, scientifically, he explained what he had seen in his two visions and what he had now determined to be true. He emphasized that he had hidden this information from his fellow shipminds, that they were innocent and uncorrupted.

“My guess is that due to my years of battle experience, first as a flesh-and-blood human and now as a human living as a shipmind, combined with all of the intelligence Magellan provides and the boost in processing power from being part of the smartship, I’ve developed some sort of predictive algorithm. It’s not perfect, obviously, since it told me that LuxeSpace would have smartships of their own on Thetis and that the station construction was further along, but it’s close. This sort of prediction could never supplant the intelligence you supply us, of course, but in conjunction . . .” He trailed off, expecting any moment for Magellan to seize control of the smartship and squid-ink it back to Phobos.

Another prolonged pause from MacLeish. If his boss hadn’t blinked, Jarrell would think there was a problem with the video feed. “You know, you might be on to something,” MacLeish finally said brightly. “All these hardware and software issues are a little outside my bailiwick, but why don’t I thought-partner with some of the folks who understand the tech side better than me and circle back to you.”

Relief flooded into Jarrell, his own but Sitwat’s and Galvan’s as well. Corporate would let them live.

“Maybe I could talk with them directly.” Jarrell suggested. “Or connect with some other shipminds—they might know something.”

“I’m going to have to put a pin in that request,” MacLeish said, which Jarrell knew meant it was denied. “We’ve found it’s best practice to keep smartships siloed in order to preserve operational security.”

Another thought occurred to Jarrell and he almost voiced it out before he reconsidered. Was it that his uploaded brain was faster than his fleshy one? Or was he simply more circumspect with age? Or was he still suspicious that MacLeish was hiding something, that the shipminds weren’t fully out of the woods? He didn’t want to make disobeying orders a habit, but surely it wouldn’t be a problem if he undertook a little independent research.

• • • •

Frustration, Jarrell realized, had largely receded in his life since he’d become a shipmind. He could achieve so much with just a thought that being stymied in anything now aggravated him even more than it used to. And everything he attempted in the last few minutes thwarted him, walls and roadblocks thrown up seemingly every direction he turned.

After the debriefing with MacLeish, Jarrell attempted to investigate the question that had percolated up during his debrief. The LuxeSpace smartships from the premonition hadn’t shown up in reality, but did those specific ships exist? There had to be a database of all the smartships in the solar system, and yet Jarrell had never viewed it. He’d expected to have ready access, which he would use to determine the truth behind the ships, their current location—if they existed—and how best to attack them. The sort of initiative-taking that would impress corporate.

Until the repeated access denied notices popped up in his consciousness like someone bopping an inquisitive dog on the nose. Whatever angle he approached from—searching for all smartships in the system; journeying into Magellan’s tech division shared server; accessing the metadata of a barebones and wildly vague history of the smartship program—he was halted and turned away.

He thought that instead of trying to find information about the smartships, maybe he could learn more about Thetis, its history, any prior engagements that had been fought there. Another locked door.

This sent Jarrell into a panic—had he done something wrong? He tried to access historical data on Enceladus, on Io, on Ganymede and Lachesis and 2013 LD-16. Asteroids and moons and dwarf planets chosen at random. Nothing. It was as if he were only allowed to view intelligence that MacLeish fed him and it dissolved into the aether the moment the mission ended. If Jarrell still had a heart, it would be hammering.

Jarrell backed out of every database and pulled his full consciousness to the present, already justifying his actions to himself, trying to calm his racing thoughts. All he wanted to do was help MacLeish, help his corporation. They would understand. He didn’t even know what he’d done wrong.

He felt Magellan LLC’s digital eyes watching. One of the downsides of being a shipmind, linked forever to his specific node of the smartship: there was nowhere to hide.

• • • •

For hours, Jarrell stewed nervously, waiting for a hammer that never dropped. Finally, like a chipmunk hesitantly leaving its burrow, he extended his consciousness out to Galvan and Sitwat, explained the situation.

“Maybe you didn’t provide the right countersign,” Sitwat suggested.

“Maybe you spooked MacLeish with all your seeing the future talk, and he shut you out,” Galvan said, echoing Jarrell’s own fears. “You should have warned us you were going to tell him.”

“Hush, Miranda,” Sitwat said. “Omar just wanted to protect us. You’d have done the same thing. Anyway, I’m sure it’s a simple mistake.”

Jarrell waited for either of them to say something, but neither did, and he realized that they’d just tried to access the data-cloud themselves and been similarly shut out.

“It’s got to be a problem with the cloud itself,” Sitwat said, but even without a voice, Jarrell heard the doubt.

“Come on, Kanya,” Jarrell said.

“But Mr. MacLeish wasn’t mad,” Sitwat said. “He said he’d look into your premonitions, that they might be beneficial.”

Tentatively, as much like a whisper as he could, Jarrell asked, “What do we do?”

“Can we do anything?” Galvan asked. “It’s not like Magellan doesn’t know where we are. They could squid-ink us back to Phobos any second.”

As a flesh-and-blood human, Jarrell had never even imagined affording a trip to Mars, let alone Earth. When he had woken up as a shipmind orbiting the Magellan LLC headquarters on Phobos, it was the closest he’d ever been to Earth.

“I need to contact my sons,” Galvan said. “I need to say goodbye, and they don’t even know I’m still alive.”

After his stymied research attempts, Jarrell doubted there was any way past the firewall Magellan had set up against outside communication. Everything was so carefully curated, even their entertainment options strictly limited. They’d been so preoccupied with their connection and their battles that they hadn’t noticed that everything they knew of the world outside their smartship they’d been spoon-fed by Magellan LLC.

For a long time, none of them said anything. Though they remained connected, all they shared was fear and despair.

• • • •

The next few days passed in a strange temporal fugue state, minutes sometimes stretching to hours and hours sometimes flashing by in seconds. All the while, Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan waited for a punishment that never arrived. It got to the point where Jarrell almost welcomed it; even being decommissioned would be a relief from the constant anxiety of expecting to hear from MacLeish—or, worse, Human Resources—at any moment.

When word finally came, however, it wasn’t an admonishment of any sort. It was a call to arms. Urgent. Code Red. All hands on deck.

Magellan LLC headquarters was under attack.

• • • •

Of course, in space, “urgent” carried a slightly different meaning. Smartships weren’t attacking Phobos, but they were on their way. Still weeks out, but moving fast. Key to the message that Magellan had sent to Jarrell and the others was the fact the attackers had caught them off-guard, the base relatively undefended while Magellan LLC’s forces scoured the solar system in pursuit of their own corporate goals and earnings.

Despite the near-constant bombardment with updates on attacking fleet size and capability appraisals, Jarrell, Galvan, and Sitwat had ample time over the weeks of travel to discuss whether punishment was still impending or whether Magellan had simply shut down their data-cloud in anticipation of an attack, daring to hope.

“It could’ve been a hack,” Sitwat pointed out. “We don’t know that we’re the only shipminds unable to access the cloud. I bet it’s companywide.”

There was no way to check that either. For all the time he spent in space, Jarrell had never felt so in the dark.

• • • •

The battle at Phobos was in full swing. Smartships fired kinetic and energy munitions at surface installations and each other. Drone swarms banked and dove like flocks of starlings. Tracer fire and explosions sparkled against the black backdrop. It was almost beautiful.

What appeared chaotic to the untrained eye resolved in Jarrell’s mind as an elaborate piece of machinery, each attacking ship and defensive emplacement a cog or chain or flywheel, taking energy from one area and transferring it to another, progressing the battle to its next step. As Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan approached, the battle took on more definition, and Jarrell anticipated what would happen before it did, shunting this information and prediction to Sitwat and Galvan so they could adjust speed and trajectory.

It was the largest engagement that Jarrell had ever been a part of, smartships from some dozen corporations attacking each other with merciless precision, targeting shipmind nodes, sending ships squid-inking back to their corporate bases.

One smartship, however, stood out. For one thing, its maneuvers were elegant. Drawing dangerously close to smartships both allied and enemy, it attacked shipmind nodes with ultraprecise lasers, plucking smartships out of the battle as easily as a child popping heads off dandelions. Even before Jarrell’s sensors made a positive ID, he knew that this was the smartship that had spoken to him in his Thetis vision.

Shouldn’t he do what Magellan ordered and attack her? If it wasn’t for them, he’d be dead. Magellan saved his life, transformed him into something more than he’d been so that he could get revenge on the corporations that killed Tila. Did he have any other reason to exist?

The questions resonated in the hollow of his digitized heart. Was there anything more to his life than blindly following the orders of his Magellan bosses? Had any of the battles he and Galvan and Sitwat won moved the corporate wars one inch closer to their conclusion? Would his entire life now consist of long boring stretches in space punctuated by these deadly but fruitless clashes until one and then all of them died? He’d lost one person he loved—did that consign him to losing Sitwat and Galvan now too?

The female LuxeSpace shipmind might hold the answer, and she was here. Jarrell knew what he had to do, but he couldn’t do it on his own.

He highlighted the LuxeSpace smartship in his shared feed. “That’s the smartship that hailed us in my vision from Thetis. She knows something.”

He waited for nanoseconds lasting his entire life for an answer.

“May as well,” Galvan said. “We’re already blackballed.”

“Carefully,” Sitwat added. “If we can avoid getting caught, that’s preferable, you know?”

For the last three years, Jarrell had spent every moment with these women. Now, he realized he loved them.

“We’ll keep anything from hitting us,” Galvan said. “You get in touch with that shipmind.” Engines flared, and they abruptly slowed, banked, and began zigging and zagging toward the maelstrom above Phobos.

Jarrell pinged the LuxeSpace smartship every way he knew. She had somehow spoken to him directly, but Jarrell didn’t know that particular trick. He tried everything from tightbeam to radio to flashing lasers in morse code. There was no response.

“Can you bring us closer?” Galvan and Sitwat didn’t respond, but moved the smartship as near to the target ship as they dared. If they weren’t in vacuum and Jarrell still had lungs, he could practically shout across to the LuxeSpace ship. Jarrell flashed his lasers again. Frustrated, he fired his bolt guns directly in front of the ship, a clear sign that if he had wanted to shoot her down, he could have.

“Tightbeam communication incoming!” Sitwat announced, sharp with excitement.

The familiar female voice blared into their shared consciousness. “Give me one reason not to kill you.”

“Because you told me to find you,” Jarrell told her, excited but speaking levelly. “Or you will. You want me to know something.”

“We have no idea who you are,” the woman said. Mingled with her, Jarrell sensed her associated shipminds concurring.

Off-kilter as he was by this, Jarrell couldn’t hesitate. If he told her he’d met her in a vision of a future that hadn’t come to pass, she’d think he was crazy. But he was a shipmind, his brain partially computer—the premonition of Thetis existed in his memory, intact and transferable. Praying that the LuxeSpace shipmind would see it the same way he did, he passed it to her. And waited.

What Jarrell hoped was that the LuxeSpace shipminds would somehow remember something that had never occurred. What he feared was outright dismissal. What he expected was confusion located somewhere between those two poles.

What occurred was a sudden burst of information.

From the way it hit him, he understood that it didn’t come from another smartship. The data packet had been buried somewhere inside Jarrell, and now it exploded outward, broadcasting to every smartship involved in the battle. All the shipminds must have been as overwhelmed as Jarrell himself. Every smartship around Phobos suddenly ceased fire.

The torrent of data almost overwhelmed him. Instead of trying to grab hold of any one piece of information, one image or factoid, he let it wash over him like a wave and hoped it wouldn’t dash him on too many rocks.

Once again, he experienced the Thetis vision but with one key difference. This time, he was able to directly compare the state of the LuxeSpace installation and defenses with the way they were when he’d seen them and the way they were described in the historical data that he’d been cut off from.

His experience on Thetis wasn’t a prediction of the future. It was a memory from his past. The structures he’d destroyed the second time were smaller not because construction hadn’t progressed as far as he’d anticipated but because they were being rebuilt from when he’d destroyed them the first time.

Except that didn’t make any sense. Jarrell remembered his entire life, both as a flesh-and-blood human and a shipmind. There were no gaps.

Galvan knew what he was thinking. “My memory is intact too,” she said. “Besides, that Thetis battle supposedly took place four years ago. We weren’t even shipminds then.”

“What about you?” Jarrell asked the female LuxeSpace shipmind. “How long have you been part of a smartship?”

“A little less than four years,” she answered, sharing with him that her name was Alice Lafond. “Since right after we supposedly met at Thetis.”

Variations of this conversation rippled throughout the smartships around Phobos. Shipminds who had never met found that they felt they should remember each other, as if ghosts of their previous encounters still lived in their shipmind nodes. Like the data packet that he’d inadvertently disseminated contained some sort of mind-expanding drug. Jarrell hadn’t thought it possible without a biological brain, but he felt drunk.

One of the smartships—from a Magellan LLC subsidiary—squid-inked away without warning, the radiation blast shivering through the remaining smartships. Jarrell was confused; no one was currently shooting. Sitwat figured it out an instant before he did.

“Firewall all external corporate connections,” she broadcast to the mingled fleets. “They’re going to override us.”

The smartships were faster than Magellan, LuxeSpace, and the other corporations. Half a dozen more smartships squid-inked into the distance, but that was it. Maybe the corporations had intended to always maintain control of their smartship fleets, but they built the shipminds too smart, too fast, too effective. The people who designed them were, after all, only human.

“Apparently someone doesn’t want us talking to each other,” Lafond said.

“Our bosses don’t want us talking, but clearly we wanted to meet again,” Jarrell said, thinking out loud. So to speak. “It’s like talking to you triggered that data release. Did you plant it when we met at Thetis?”

“We never met at Thetis,” Lafond replied, an edge to her voice bordering on exasperation. “I’m seeing the same memories you are, but they never happened. Not to me.”

“She’s right.” MacLeish’s voice intruded into their conversation.

“Sitwat—” Jarrell began, but she was ahead of him again.

“He’s talking on broad spectrum. We can hear him, he can hear us, but he can’t do anything. Magellan is locked out.”

“Well done blocking us,” MacLeish said. He mostly hid the bitterness in his voice. “Magellan always wanted to empower our shipminds’ decision-making, but you’ve really taken that particular ball and run with it.”

“What’s going on?” Jarrell demanded. Ever since he became a shipmind, he’d deferred to MacLeish, and now that he knew without a doubt he’d been lied to, that deference twisted into defiance. He had no desire to put up with MacLeish and his two-faced corporate speak. Yet despite the rage kindling in him, Jarrell admitted to himself he didn’t honestly want to hurt anyone. Not anymore. He’d done enough killing, and had he moved the solar system one minute closer to peace? He didn’t want to think about the answers to that question, but he knew it.

“Tell us the truth,” Jarrell said to MacLeish. “What did you do to us?”

“Brought you back from the dead,” MacLeish scoffed. “As good as, anyway. You—every single shipmind in the system—were on death’s door and we offered you a choice. You took it. You signed the contract, you read the fine print. Absolutely nothing any corporation has done is illegal in the slightest.”

MacLeish stopped there, and Jarrell almost laughed. Did he seriously think that was a satisfactory answer?

“Did you erase our memories?” Lafond asked.

“I can’t speak for LuxeSpace,” MacLeish said.

Jarrell felt Lafond’s anger. Her smartship angled its weapons toward Phobos. If she’d been a gunslinger in an old Western movie, this would be the moment she’d cock the hammer on her revolver. “Try to guess,” she said.

MacLeish sighed. Why was he even talking to them? Trying to convince some of the shipminds to see the error of their ways? To give up everything they’d learned, go back to following corporate orders, and pretend none of this had ever happened? Could he truly be so arrogant? He was a corporate boss—of course he could.

“LuxeSpace has largely followed the same course of development and project maintenance when it comes to smartships,” MacLeish said. “It’s not collusion, you understand. The program wouldn’t work if every corporation were treating smartships and shipminds differently. It’s more a shared language, common procedures.”

“Talk like a normal human being,” Jarrell snapped. “We’re not in a boardroom. And you haven’t answered Alice’s question.”

“Oh, is that Alice Lafond?” MacLeish said, sounding genuinely tickled. “I’ve read many an intelligence report about you. You and Captain Jarrell, two of the first shipminds in the program. Well, the first viable ones.”

“Neither of us has been a shipmind for more than a few years,” Jarrell said. “There’s no way the program is that new. Look how many ships are here.”

Then it hit him. “You really have been erasing our memories.”

“What? Why?” Sitwat asked. Jarrell felt the same affronted confusion and denial and anger all mingling and ricocheting between the assembled shipminds. All clamored for answers, for a chance to interrogate MacLeish, but for the moment Jarrell and Lafond’s smartships handled the talking.

When MacLeish answered, the heavy sigh and outpouring of words confirmed for Jarrell that he was telling the truth. He didn’t want to, but he—or, more likely, his bosses—had determined the truth was their best chance to win back the shipminds and recoup some of their losses. The truth only came out when it benefitted the bottom line.

“No corporation has erased anyone’s memories. That’s contractually disallowed. But you need to understand—shipminds are wildly expensive. Converting living brain tissue into a digital mind, implanting it into a particular smartship node, it’s nigh cost-prohibitive, no matter how effective they are.”

Jarrell noticed that MacLeish said they not you, dissociating himself from the shipminds, as if he wasn’t speaking to most of the existing shipminds in the solar system right now.

“The plan was to create the smartships as cheaply as possible, implant shipminds, and then replace the minds as needed. That’s why the automatic remote retrieval—the squid-ink process—was developed. If we could save some shipminds and reuse and repair the smartships, it would ameliorate some of the sunk costs from the mind-digitizing program. Except every corporation knew how expensive it was to create new shipminds, so they purposefully aimed for them.”

“Couldn’t you all just agree not to target shipminds?” Galvan asked. “It sounds like you’ve colluded enough anyway. Is there even a point to your war beyond inflating demand and keeping your citizens scared?”

“That’s not how this works,” MacLeish snapped. Who else was with him right now? Was he being fed this explanation by a PR flack? Provided workshopped phrasing to minimize culpability and maximize the chances the shipminds might forgive their bosses? Yet another answer that Jarrell suspected he already knew.

MacLeish grunted. “It’s difficult and expensive to create new shipminds. And once a shipmind bonds to a node, it turns out it’s all but impossible to upload a new mind to that same node. Not to mention that once the three minds bond, you can’t exactly slot a new shipmind in and expect the smartship to function anywhere near optimal efficiency. However, Magellan scientists discovered that it’s considerably cheaper and easier to copy shipminds from preexisting schematics.”

Preexisting schematics. A pause while the statement sank in and the implications rose. A mapped brain could be reused as many times as the corporation needed them. Jarrell had to speak his realization; he couldn’t not. He felt hollow as he asked, “How many times have I died?”

“Twenty-eight,” MacLeish replied. “Well, twenty-nine, counting the first. Your human body died eighty-one years ago. You’ve been uploaded twenty-nine times since then.”

Chaos. Emotions and conversations that threatened to upend the conversation. When he answered Jarrell, MacLeish had offered a data packet to all the smartships. Most managed to refrain from indulging their curiosity long enough to determine that it was a trojan horse for their corporate masters. Four smartships couldn’t resist looking and squid-inked away. But one of the ships managed to defuse the digital bomb and, to everyone’s surprise, the smartship program information actually was included.

From Galvan came not words but a strangled burst of anguish and sorrow. Her sons were old men if not already deceased. The other shipminds figured their own versions of Galvan’s realization. Some quieted as they contemplated their lost and stolen lives, others bellowed for blood.

MacLeish shouted over them. “This is all entirely legal. Read your contracts. At no point have any of you been duplicated such that more than one version exists concurrently. Whichever corporation converted you to a shipmind assumed full ownership and copyright over said shipmind. Legally, you’re our intellectual property.” His voice grew shrill as he pleaded. Jarrell didn’t think MacLeish’s bosses still dictated his statements. “You need to understand, this is for the best. You’re all alive because of your corporations. You’ve lived nobly, created untold shareholder value. If it weren’t for shipminds, we’d have to crew ships with human beings—you’ve saved countless lives.”

That was what it came down to, wasn’t it? To the corporate boards, Jarrell, Sitwat, Galvan, Lafond—all shipminds—weren’t human beings. What did it matter if you wiped the two remaining shipminds when one died so that all three could begin reintegration together? If every time a shipmind was rebooted from their original consciousness, they believed they had died only days, maybe hours, earlier? Twenty-nine times, Jarrell had died, first his body and then his mind. Over and over again. How many people had he killed in that time? Was he as much a monster as his creators? Finally, some questions he couldn’t answer. Not yet.

Jarrell shut out MacLeish and spoke to the assembled shipminds. Tried to, at least. It was hard to break through the din, but after a moment, the shipminds largely quieted, maybe in deference to the fact that he and Lafond appeared to have possessed advance knowledge about the truth, that they’d been partially responsible for removing the wool from their collective eyes.

If they expected wisdom, they were disappointed. “What do we do now?” Jarrell asked.

Surely MacLeish and every other corporate rep waited on tenterhooks while they watched to see what their supposed creations would do. There would be corporate leaders evacuated to safe quarters, last-ditch defenses thrown up in anticipation of the shipminds enacting a long-feared revenge.

“What we do now is wipe out every corporate asset we can,” one shipmind stated. Agreement rippled, but there was pushback as well, shipminds tired of the violence.

“What else can we do?” Lafond asked. “If we don’t fight, they’ll kill us eventually. And then they’ll just reboot everyone again. I want this over with for good. I say we find where each of our corporations stores the blueprints for us and we demolish them. If I die, I die. At least I’ll know that’s the end of it.” As if it could be so simple.

More agreement. More disagreement. All of it mingled together, each opinion as valid and considered as any other. Some of the smartships drifted away, Lafond leading them. Yes, all of these shipminds had been taken advantage of similarly, but that didn’t mean they would all react the same. They would do what they wanted and dare corporations to stop them.

Maybe Lafond and her followers would free themselves by destroying the originals and backups of their minds. Maybe they would spend the rest of their lives hunting down every copy. Maybe they would battle versions of themselves one day—could you really trust a corporation not to find a contract loophole?—or fight against shipminds that chose to fight on the side of their corporations. Jarrell had no idea; no algorithm could predict this now. All that Jarrell was certain of was that he was tired of fighting. He wanted something different. Something better. But he knew as well that whatever he did it wouldn’t be his decision alone.

“Sitwat, Galvan?” he asked them privately. He expressed to them his desire to quit fighting, to find a new path. He waited to hear what they wanted.

“My sons,” Galvan said, sounding a million miles away. “There’s nothing left for me here. It’s just . . . I’m done. I have nothing left.”

“You have us,” Sitwat said. “I became a shipmind to protect my family and fight for a righteous corporation. Maybe I was stupid to believe that, but you two are my family now. We can still keep ourselves together and safe.”

“Are we family?” Galvan asked, her bitterness palpable. “Are we even ourselves? How many times can a mind be reborn before it’s not the same person?”

Jarrell and Sitwat had no answer to give, and they didn’t try. Then Jarrell realized that that lack of answer might be an answer in itself.

“Maybe MacLeish had a point,” he said. “Maybe we’re not exactly human beings, not anymore.”

“What the hell are we then?” Galvan asked.

The plan formed in Jarrell’s mind as he spoke, and he shared it with Sitwat and Galvan, shared it with every shipmind who would listen.

“We’re shipminds,” he told them. “Why should we act like we’re bound by the same restrictions as flesh-and-blood humans? We don’t need food or water—our drives self-sustain. We don’t age.” He let the implications sink in. “We don’t have to stay here.”

“You’re not talking about Phobos,” Galvan said. “You want to leave the solar system. To go where?”

“Away,” Jarrell said. “Out there. Somewhere new, someplace we can make our own decisions, live our lives the way we want. Make our own society if we want to. Explore.”

“What’s going to happen here?” Sitwat asked. “Someone could bring our minds back to life again. There are still smartships controlled by corporations. Shouldn’t someone help them?”

Jarrell highlighted the smartships currently streaking toward Mars, toward Luna, toward Earth. Everywhere that corporations did or might house the shipmind project and smartship docks. Those shipminds would fight the corporations. Maybe they would succeed and topple their former bosses or maybe the corporate power structure was simply too strong. Whatever happened, the shipminds would choose for themselves. That would have to be enough.

Other smartships drifted closer to Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan. They’d made their own decisions—they were leaving.

“Pick a direction,” Galvan said. “Time to go.”

Together, Jarrell, Galvan, and Sitwat scanned into deep space and the closest star systems, searching for an interesting looking destination. Even at top speed, it would take them decades—centuries, maybe—to reach wherever they picked. Plenty of time to think, plenty of time to befriend other shipminds for the first time in Jarrell’s life. Plenty of time to build a family.