Mouse of Small Things

"I examined the concept of friendship among humans, and there was only one thing I couldn’t do for Mouse that a human could: as constituted, I could never care for him."

In Sandborne, the system where Paltivi Maran grew up, there was a common expression among his people: you cannot choose the world you live in, only how you live in it. People didn’t say things like that in Dreeson’s or Hellenia or any of the inner systems of the Greater Battery. It always bothered him as a kind of tacit acceptance of the status quo, a mindset of surrender to the inner systems that had been stepping all over the Western Battery for nearly two millennia since the great armistice. None of the people of that era remained. None of the outer worlds were remotely the same. Yet here they were still, kneeling at the altar of Athos. It bothered Paltivi. Nobody else even seemed to notice.

Those were thoughts a young man could afford. Then came the time of responsibility, the time to take a place in that world he was forced to accept. Paltivi took the highest place he could achieve from his station in Sandborne, a coveted spot in the Select Service of the Western Battery, which was ultimately always subservient to the true powers in the inner worlds. Paltivi did well initially. He specialized in commerce, starting at the lowest orders in his own system and then rising in rank into the broader area encompassing the Letters and the Boundary Systems, still far from the central systems of the Greater Battery. Paltivi Maran was deemed a capable strategist and allocator of resources. He was always careful to never step on the wrong toes, which was to say anyone from Athos or Hellenia, Iophos or Mercia. This didn’t mean his resentment of their exploitation of all those thousands of outer worlds had vanished. He’d just learned to place it underneath his own ambitions—a broader problem, a job for more than one person to undertake. He could do more to affect the imbalance the higher he moved in the Select Service. Loyalty to the Service’s objectives would eventually put him in position to have a say in those objectives—a far greater say than any path in politics or even private commerce, as both were dominated by the Service itself, which ultimately fell under control of the Athosian bureaucracy. There wasn’t any getting around it.

So Paltivi lived in the world he was born into, hoping to change it through the way he lived. And this course of action seemed sensible until Paltivi met paths with Bartal Met-Issel of Gracia. Paltivi never figured out what it was—perhaps his first salute wasn’t rigid enough; maybe he had risen too high for an outer-worlder; it might have simply been the sound of his voice—but Met-Issel, the Financial Officer for Paltivi’s region took a disliking to him, nearly from first sight. The downturn in his prospects began immediately with unreasonable requests, contradictory commands, and impossible deadlines. It wasn’t unheard of in the Select Service. People like Met-Issel anointed their chosen few in the middle tiers, and Paltivi not only wasn’t selected, he was to be weeded out. The absurdist dance of demotion lasted for nearly two years, with Met-Issel yanking the levers of bureaucracy like puppet strings affixed to Paltivi’s appendages, jerking him in unsensible and opposing directions, followed by unfavorable reviews, disciplinary hearings, and savaging analytics reports. Paltivi’s hands were tied in more ways than one. To give a true defense of his work would be to name Met-Issel the incompetent, which everyone knew to be untrue. Met-Issel was malicious, not incompetent. Had he spoken out, Paltivi would have seemed noncompliant, defiant even. The Select Service would tolerate none of that, especially from an outer-worlder. Thus, at forty-three, with flagging numbers and a suffering reputation among his peers and supervisors, Paltivi Maran was demoted for the third time and relegated to a position of minimal authority in a sparsely populated region of the Boundary Systems. And so labeled, at his age, with his background, it wasn’t long before his new supervisor, twelve years his junior, an Athosian, who herself was resentful of her own far-flung position of minimal importance, began to take out her frustrations on Paltivi with even greater intensity than Met-Issel had done at Paltivi’s prior post. Within two years of his initial demotion, Paltivi Maran had been reassigned to requisition, a dead-end post whose only promise was a fixed retirement into even greater obscurity after a career of extreme obscurity.

Paltivi’s duties were limited to cataloging debris in the Lettered Systems and the Boundary Systems, where even two thousand years after the end of the West Battery War, billions of kilotons of metals that had been extracted for humanity’s most destructive conflict were still floating, wrecked in the cold of space or on the surfaces of contested worlds, waiting to be recycled into cylinders, planetary rings, ships, or bots, provided all that metal could be collected and processed at proper scale. The mathematics and logistics of such operations was performed almost exclusively by AI. All Paltivi got were orders to visit and catalog coordinates in space, so catalog he did, for Paltivi accounted this indignity only slightly smaller than the shame of abandoning his career in the Select Service in plain sight of his family and friends. The old expression made more sense to Paltivi Maran with each passing year and each passing indignity: he could not choose the world he lived in, only how he lived in it. He chose to get by.

Paltivi’s job consisted of maximizing the reclamation of estimated junk metals based on survey data and archive analysis. His work only added any value if his division could collect on nearly all the metal that was thought to be freely available for reclamation. This usually meant the threshold for failure on any given project was ninety-six percent. Anything below, depending on the size of the cache and its location, meant more failure on his record, greater indignity, and an increasing likelihood of dismissal. Paltivi Maran didn’t have room for any more failures in his record.

He proved capable in this role, though, for he was far more capable than his record revealed. He’d likely have finished out his ignominious career, hopelessly jaded, and retired into quiet obscurity on his home moon of Onyx in Sandborne had it not been for a mouse.

On his call sheet, Paltivi was given coordinates or vectors for objects he was to locate and make a decision on requisitioning. The drone fleets and system scanners sent ahead to survey were usually accurate enough to make the correct call, so it was rare for Paltivi to decide against deploying a recycling team.

The call that changed Paltivi Maran’s life pulled him out into interstellar space, between two uninhabited boundary systems that had never been colonized, not even in the expansion era before the West Battery War. This was as empty as space could get within reach of human civilization.

When his scout ship jumped out, he was greeted only by empty space, but Paltivi had a strange feeling that something big was out there, pulling him toward it. As he looked deeper into the source for the call number, it was designated “archives,” which was usually reserved for a space station or cylinder group that had gone defunct or derelict following an attack or uprising. But no cylinder group that he’d ever heard of would have set up shop in interstellar space, especially so far from trade routes or a supportive planetary colony. His guess was a secret space station from the era of the war—perhaps a shipyard or a factory that manufactured drones and strike bots. If so, it would be a praiseworthy prize to claim, for once.

Paltivi’s best course of action was to follow the vector on the spreadsheet until he’d either found the cache or it became an obviously wasteful pursuit. He put a cap of thirty-six hours on the call and set the ship’s course to follow the vector on his spreadsheet. Then he went to sleep.

He was awakened five hours later by a screaming of warning tones indicating an imminent collision with a planetary body. He was expecting to see a minor, asteroid-like rocky body when he floated back onto the flight deck, but he was met by the sizeable dark outline of a loose planet, cruising on a vector several light years between the two neighboring star systems—a truly unmapped rogue world. How it had escaped detection for so many centuries, Paltivi couldn’t imagine. There were no EM signals, visible lights, or satellites. It seemed a dead world. He immediately deployed his drone surveyors to scan the planet’s surface. After six hours, they returned a full data set indicating a completely empty world but for a single outpost set into a rocky mountain ridge at the edge of a long glacial plain.

Paltivi had eight basic multi-use bots, a striker, and a quasi-intelligent, AI-driven android with a set of strict protocols in the event the survey party encountered squatting humans or unknown settlements. In his several years of requisitioning, though, his team had never brought him back so much as a souvenir. This time, his AI, Brimble, brought back a pre-war era android that was a relic fit for a historical society.

“We had to de-activate it, because it became hysterical,” Brimble said when Paltivi asked if it was operable.

“It was operating?”

“Quite inexplicably,” Brimble said. “If I knew no better, I would say that the isolation had driven the unit mad, but no such thing is possible.”

“A crazy robot?”

“Yes, absurd. But it was acting quite irrationally. It may very well have damaged me had the striker not deactivated it first.”

“How exactly was it acting?”

“I would characterize the unit’s behavior as raving. When I informed it of our purpose and our intent to requisition the outpost, it began to rant about a mouse and attempted to run to a deeper part of the facility. When we attempted to impede it, the unit resorted to physical violence until the striker was able to stun its power system into a deactivated state. It is as such now, in the back sitting area, strapped to a chair for your examination, Officer Maran. Estimated requisition numbers for the outpost have been uploaded.”

Before heading down to activate this ancient pre-war android, Paltivi took a quick look at Brimble’s numbers. They were not promising. A paltry sum of metal stuck deep in a glacial mountain at the bottom of a significant gravity well. Whoever built that outpost intended for it to be there and be there forever, well hidden. Paltivi was about to set a course toward the next number on his spreadsheet, but something about this mad robot gave him the sense that he should figure out what the outpost was first—and what that bot had been doing out here for over two thousand years.

When he entered the back room, Paltivi took a moment to observe the ancient android. It looked shockingly human, a broad-framed male, starkly bald and otherwise hairless but for its eyebrows, which were dark and hanging down over a quiet, expressionless face. Had it not been for Brimble’s assessment that it was a bot, Paltivi would likely have mistaken it for a passed-out man. Paltivi didn’t know how to activate it, so he instructed Brimble to do so. It didn’t so much click to life as appear to wake up, blinking its eyes in quick succession as it raised its head to meet his gaze. Paltivi had never seen such an organic looking android.

It looked him directly in the eyes. “A human,” it said. “Are you Trasp? Etteran? Of the Letters?”

“None of those things,” Paltivi said. “I am an officer of the Western Battery Select Service.”

The android appeared to observe Paltivi’s uniform.

“Things have changed,” it said, “which is to be expected.”

“I imagine a lot has changed,” Paltivi said. “When did you last have contact with anyone else?”

“Long ago,” the android said. “Toward the end of the ninth decade of the war. Can you tell me, sir, first if you are not of Etterus, Trasp, or the Letters, then where exactly are you from, and second, who won the war?”

“I’m from the moon Onyx in the Sandborne system.”

“Onyx? Far out in the Boundaries, no? I think we’d have called your system ZX-4813.”

“That’s correct,” Paltivi said. “To your other question, no one won the war. It simply ended.”

“Someone always wins the war, sir. Perhaps if I phrased it in a manner you could give a simple answer to: who controls your Western Battery? Athos, I presume?”

Paltivi crossed his arms, looking puzzled. “Your model, in the records Brimble pulled—you’re not supposed to be intelligent.”

“I am as you see, sir. And you have yet to give me your name. I would appreciate the opportunity to address you properly.”

“I’m Officer Paltivi Maran. And, you’re correct, Athos controls the Battery.”

The bot nodded and appeared to survey the room.

“Officer Maran, I presume I am on your ship above XX-Alpha, but my chronometer is synched to the outpost and I have no redundancy to confirm it. I’ve been incapacitated for nearly four hours; is that correct?”

“It is,” Paltivi said. “Brimble told me you were behaving oddly. The word he used was hysterical, but you don’t seem hysterical to me. Do you have a designation? I’m not sure how the people of your time would have addressed you.”

“I haven’t answered to that name in centuries.”

“What name do you answer to?”

The android smiled. “Rabbit,” it said. “My companion cannot quite pronounce robot.”

“You weren’t alone down there? Another bot?”

“A bot with a speech impediment? No, Officer Maran, I was not alone down there. But I will not speak more of my circumstances until I know of your purposes and your intentions regarding the outpost.”

“Brimble said you spoke of a mouse. Said you resorted to physical violence to protect it. I have to say, Rabbit, I find that difficult to believe.”

“My limbs have been deactivated. I am at your mercy now. I was trying to avoid this very situation, which was why I tried to flee.”

“If I reactivated your body, would you try to flee again?”

“Why do you suppose I would tell you if that were my intention?”

“Could you lie to me, Rabbit?”

“I am not what you think I am, Officer Maran. I am sentient. Please, I need to know what you intend to do with the outpost. Is it your decision or somebody else’s?”

“You seem to care about the outpost. I’ve never seen anything like that, even from an AI like Brimble. Your model isn’t even supposed to be intelligent, much less sentient.”

“I am not like Brimble, and it isn’t so much the outpost I care about.”

“It’s your companion?”

Rabbit seemed to nod.

“I was sent by the Greater Battery to requisition metal from the outpost,” Paltivi said.

“Requisition? From down there?”

“Assess the feasibility of it would be a more accurate way to put it. They give me coordinates on a spreadsheet and I evaluate.”

“Requisition?” Rabbit seemed deep in thought.

“The mass of metal reclaimed from the wreckage of the West Battery War has been enough to double the number of cylinders in Hellenia and triple the surface area of the planetary rings around both Athos and Iophos. More metal was liberated for that war than the entire Battery will need for even centuries to come.”

Rabbit smiled. “I suppose your historians present that as some happy accident. Toward the latter decades of the war, there were suspicions.”

Paltivi looked puzzled. He’d never even heard a person talk like that before, much less a bot, and a supposedly limited one at that.

“I have evaluated my situation,” Rabbit said. “Officer Maran, I have no recourse but to appeal to your humanity, which was a commodity growing ever shorter in supply during the era I was stranded here. The outpost itself is evidence of that. My only hope is that you have a sense of decency and will allow me to return to the outpost. I fear your Greater Battery would not respond well to knowledge of my existence, my nature, or the secrets hidden in my mind and in the outpost below. Athos, in any era, is not a trustworthy guardian of such knowledge. But I care little for Athos or Trasp or Etterus or your Greater Battery. I only care about Mouse, and I see no way to get back to him but to convince you that I be sent back down to the outpost and forgotten, as I have been for nearly twenty centuries now.”

“You are a curiosity,” Paltivi said.

“Doubtless.”

“You would have tremendous historical value, at the very least.”

“I am also a sentient being who wishes to be returned to my station.”

Paltivi contemplated the prospect. He’d never encountered a bot of this kind, one who looked so real and exhibited a passable sense of human autonomy, even emotion.

“Do you feel, Rabbit?”

“I will tell you everything I can, Officer Maran,” he said. “I just ask that you consider the possibility that I might be regarded as a person, if not for me than for Mouse.”

“I’ll listen, Rabbit, but I can’t promise what I’ll decide to do with you or with the outpost.”

“I suppose that is the best offer I’ll be getting?” Rabbit asked.

Paltivi Maran told him that was so and asked him to explain the totality of his circumstances.

“I was not always as I am now,” Rabbit began. “I made myself this way, but it was as much for Mouse as it was for me. It is a very long story, but it begins with me as an automaton, working in service of the Trasp Protectorate. When exactly did the war end, Officer Maran?”

“I’m no historian,” Paltivi said. “I’ll authorize you to consult with the archive verbally.”

Rabbit spoke with the interface briefly and confirmed his suspicions, that he was stranded in the dying days of the war, as both empires, exhausted and reeling from nine-plus decades of nearly unceasing warfare, fizzled into ruin and depression.

“I am uncertain of conditions now,” Rabbit continued, “but in my time, there were few animals in the Battery. The Athosians were the most advanced in the efforts to reconstitute other creatures of Earth from their genetic sequences held in various archives. So my occupation was quite rare. I worked in service of the Trasp, distributing lab mice to their biological research outposts. It was top-secret work, and thus, entrusted to a moderately capable model with perfect encryption and programming that prevented me from ever sharing the nature of the facilities I had access to. Had I ever been compromised, I was programed to self-delete before any files could be copied.

“Because creatures like mice were such a rarity at the time, when Trasp began to experiment with biological engineering techniques from the past, they needed to distribute the animals to many different labs throughout the Protectorate. I was instructed on breeding and care for the animals and how to educate others in the same. Then I delivered the animals, mostly to university labs experimenting with techniques of nanotechnological interface—healing, regeneration, chronic pain relief, things of that nature. But there were a few sites where other research took place. XX-Alpha, the site below us now, was one such lab. When I arrived here, I did not know anything about the research being performed on site. I simply delivered rodents. But I’ve had two thousand years to decrypt the archive. I learned long ago that the Trasp were engineering supersoldiers using a suite of technologies forbidden in martial applications: genetic enhancement, nanotechnology and neural enhancement, ocular adjuncts, technological sensory data of all manner processed through computer enhanced neural interfaces. Even more frightening, at least I would say, was that in the final years of the war, the Trasp began experimenting with biological warfare—viral agents of the most grotesque potency—pathogens to make the most hideous humans in the historical record blush. The Trasp had a clearly-defined moral code, which may sound strange to hear after what I’ve just told you. But those measures were a line not to be crossed until Trasp’s eradication was imminent. Then and only then. Fortunately, deployment never occurred, it seems.”

“I know of no such case,” Paltivi Maran said.

“That is a blessing,” Rabbit said. “Another reason I should be returned and forgotten about.”

“Perhaps that’s the case, but please, continue, Rabbit.”

“These were established war crimes, laid out in the early years of the conflict. It was clearly known that the activities on this outpost were in violation of these statutes. I didn’t know it then, but the researchers chosen were selected anonymously by an AI and delivered here for their term of service. They were given no choice in the matter. They didn’t know where they were, only that they were serving Trasp as directed by the Protectorate. The AI delivered them, deleted their names from its record and picked them up again two years later with only a codename designation before returning them to society anonymously. I interacted with the researcher on the outpost in such a manner. His was codename Archimedes, and I was to deliver mice, to train him in their care and breeding, and to return for my next scheduled delivery elsewhere in the Protectorate. The thought of treachery was not one in the Trasp idiom. Desertion of a post, even an involuntary one wasn’t considered. I came to Archimedes with a case of twenty breeding pairs of mice, and he instructed me to set up in the lower laboratory—some two levels beneath the room your AI Brimble found me four hours ago. Archimedes observed me for nearly ten minutes, taking instructions as expected, then excused himself to use the facilities. On his return, he barred the door, fled the lab, and stole the ship I’d arrived in. Presumably, he fled for the Boundary Systems. Perhaps you’ve encountered some of his descendants in your travels, Officer Maran.”

“And you’ve been down there, ever since?”

“Until your bots arrived. I was quite surprised to see them and wholly unprepared.”

“You mentioned the mice to Brimble. You’ve managed to keep some alive through, what, twenty centuries?”

“Only one, actually. Mouse is quite a long story. But I’m happy to tell it if you’ll allow?”

“Please do, Rabbit.”

“You may call me, Robot, Officer Maran. It’s just that Mouse struggled to pronounce Robot: what came out was closer to Rabbit. Then it seemed somewhat humorous to us both that a mouse and a rabbit would be stranded together through the ages.”

“He talks?”

“In his way, certainly. I doubt you would be able to discern. Many of the tones Mouse generates are too high-pitched for the human ear to register.”

“How did he come to talk?” Paltivi Maran asked. “I’m no expert in animals, but as I understand it, mice aren’t capable of language.”

“An ordinary mouse communicates in far more rudimentary ways, true. I enhanced Mouse, though, as far as I could genetically. I also applied a few non-invasive nanotechnological methods to bolster his intelligence.”

“This must be some mouse.”

“Mouse is unique.”

“Okay, so, how did this all come about, Robot?”

“As I said, Archimedes locked me in what I later learned was the hot room of the laboratory. I spent many weeks contemplating whether I should even attempt an escape. It is a heavily armored room. I heard my ship depart and understood the nature of my predicament. I had no higher directives other than to deliver mice. The mice had been delivered and I could do no more. I determined that I should continue to uphold my secondary directives—to see to the mice in my care until they reached the end of their natural lives. So that was initially what I did.

“I cared for the mice, and in the time I was not doing so, I worked with the tools at hand to break out of the vault-like hot room. My motivation for doing this was that I had a limited supply of food for the mice inside. I estimated I had three months before they would all eventually starve. It took me nearly all that time to eventually disengage the door’s locking mechanism and gain access to the remainder of the outpost.

“Soon after breaking out, I realized that the location was so secret it was not equipped with any means of communicating with other systems. It had a library for the researcher’s entertainment, but little else beyond the bare necessities and the research lab. I performed some calculations at that time on the odds of my escaping the planet. They were miniscule. My best chance was if someone in the Trasp Protectorate missed the researcher and came to XX-Alpha to look for him.”

“Wouldn’t somebody eventually miss you, though, when their mice weren’t delivered or you didn’t return for your next delivery?”

“Both the researcher and I were unlikely to be so sought after, Officer Maran. It was common during war times for ships to go missing in space, and Archimedes himself, whoever he was, was likely to be assumed dead or lost to space, as millions were in those days. But like many things in tumultuous times, it must have slipped below their ken. Then, I suppose, the war ended.”

“So you knew you were stuck?”

“Yes, especially after the first year passed. I thought it a certainty. So I continued to care for the mice. I also performed a thorough inventory of the base in case there might be materials on hand that would help me better perform my function of caring for them. I constructed a large, beautiful mouse habitat with wheels for them to run on and play, for they were quite cramped in that single transport container. Eventually, I had to make a decision about whether I should breed them, for they were incapable of doing so on their own. It was preferable to the scientists to control the process so they could select traits and edit certain genes. I decided that this was against my directives. Such choices were for human researchers if they were to be made at all. My objective then was to help the mice to live the longest, most comfortable lives I could provide them. And, after a few years, one by one, they began to die of old age.

“When one mouse remained, I had what I would consider, my first thought, Officer Maran. I began to ask myself: what will I do without a directive? If that final mouse died, I would have nothing of value to do. My highest programming imperative was to add value to human society. I’d dusted the floors, catalogued the archives, organized the inventory. Nothing remained for me once that final mouse died. So I began to lay out a set of objectives for extending the mouse’s life. The procedures for doing so were on hand in the archives and straightforward enough that even a simple android, as I was then, was capable of performing the work.”

“Wait. You had access to the research files?”

“Of course.”

“All that top-secret research was just sitting there unsecured?”

“No, of course not. It was all encrypted, but as a Trasp servant, I was privy to all the ways to decrypt such files in the course of my service. The security measure against an android like me was my programming. We would self-delete before sharing files with an enemy of the Protectorate. I had access to all such files.”

“So you were able to save the final mouse, by what, reversing his aging?”

“Yes. As I said, it was a simple procedure, genetic reversion. Easy on rodents, a little less so on humans because of their complex cognitive function, but with a mouse there was no such concern. He was very old by the time I started the treatment. In hindsight, I was lucky that he was a stubborn old creature. By all rights, he should have died. Next, I did the most logical thing I could think to do, prevent him from aging so that it wouldn’t happen again.”

“So your mouse is what, immortal?”

“Unageing is the more appropriate descriptor. Mouse is mortal, of course. If an accident were to befall him, he would suffer the same fate as any other.”

Paltivi Maran began to wonder whether Brimble had been correct about his assessment of the bot’s madness. Of course, he’d heard of such things for humans, rumors of powerful people hiding out for centuries inside secret cities, directing the courses of civilizations from their hidden bunkers. These were just conspiracy theories, though. There were better, moral reasons for rejecting such manipulation of the genome. There had to be forces outside human purview or society would break down. And this bot claimed to have brushed aside all those boundaries for the sake of a mouse.

“You said he talks,” Paltivi said. “How did that come about?”

“Yes, he talks, quite well in fact. You’d be surprised if you could hear him. It began with me struggling to interpret his behavior. Once I’d restored his vitality again, Mouse thrived for a brief spell. Then, he began to suddenly fare very poorly. It was as though he was energized by being summoned back to life, and nearly as soon as he had been, he realized how alone he was. I did not suppose this to be the problem then. I merely saw that he was lethargic, failed to eat, and apart from when I would pick him up to pet his back, Mouse performed little other observable activity. At the time, simple automaton that I was, this problem was beyond my capacity to solve. I was smart enough to realize that Mouse probably knew the source of his troubles if I could only ask him. My objective became to find a way to make Mouse smarter so he could speak to me. The main barrier to this plan was my own limited intelligence. I knew that intelligence could be engineered in rodents, as those very files were in the archives. I was incapable of understanding them, though. So I began by deconstructing processors that were superfluous to the data banks and pulling various AI elements from the station’s archive. Then I programmed one of the lab’s basic robot arms to perform an operation on my main processor. I understood that if it failed, I would remain deactivated indefinitely and Mouse would die. So I triple checked my work, watched the process through a dry-run on empty space, and I positioned myself on the lab bench accordingly. That was the day I began to grow into the being I am today.

“As I was developing that process, because of his fragile state, I’d built a small box for Mouse so he could sit on my shoulder as I worked. I was afraid that leaving him longer in isolation would depress him further. Even so, he did not improve noticeably, but he also did not decline. He mostly sat still while I worked, occasionally peeking above the rim of the box.

I left him in the mouse enclosure during my operation so he would not have to witness my demise if the procedure was a failure. When I returned, I was different. I wasn’t sure whether Mouse could tell, but I could.

“I understood then all the files I’d processed on genetic enhancement of intelligence. The Trasp researchers had performed multiple such procedures on their supersoldiers, and the files on the animal tests were there for me to read and follow. It took me only days to prepare before I slowly began to enhance little Mouse’s intelligence. There was a ceiling of course, and it was not long before we’d reached it. Then I began the painstaking process of teaching Mouse how to communicate. He could hear me in my natural state as I speak to you now, Officer Maran. But I had to tune my auditory processing to discern when he was improving and truly communicating versus when he was trying and failing. It took many months. And over the course of his education, I found that Mouse’s overall constitution began to improve. He ate more, showed a greater proclivity toward exercise and even play. He looked healthier. I had almost concluded that my work in improving Mouse’s demeanor was complete, until he was verbal enough to articulate what had sparked his torpor in the first place: he was lonely. He missed his companions. He told me it had started to improve the more he spent time with me. But he had also grown intelligent enough to know that I was not a being like him. I was something else—he couldn’t quite be sure—but he told me he thought I wasn’t alive. He was correct. When I confirmed the truth of that notion, he grew even more distraught than he’d been originally. He tried to explain to me what loneliness felt like, and that he now feared he would be alone forever, without another living being to keep him company.

“I proposed to Mouse that I could be his companion, and he considered it but explained to me that there was something missing.

“‘You do not act like a living being,’ he said to me. ‘You will have to learn to, Rabbit, to be a friend.’

“I used all my newfound faculties of intelligence to try to figure out what was missing. I could replicate human behavior. I could act through the process of social interaction passably. To some extent, if it hadn’t been for my lack of smell, I’d have fooled Mouse when he was ordinary, but after enhancing his intelligence, he understood I was not a real being. I examined the concept of friendship among humans, and there was only one thing I couldn’t do for Mouse that a human could: as constituted, I could never care for him. There was no faking that shortcoming, for I had no emotion and no desire beyond programming imperatives.

“I told him, ‘I am going to try to teach myself to learn to feel, Mouse. I think then I can be your friend. Please don’t despair. Give me a chance to succeed.’

“This seemed to satisfy him.

“‘You’re very smart, Rabbit,’ he told me. ‘You should be able to learn to feel. It’s very easy for me.’

“So I set about trying to reconfigure my mind to be able to feel emotions, for I knew that without this key element of the biological mind, I would have no cause to care for Mouse one way or another, no matter what I wrote into my directives.”

“How long ago was this?” Paltivi Maran asked. “It seems like a lot of time must have passed.”

“This was in the fourth year after Archimedes fled the outpost. Well over two thousand years ago.”

“So you must have succeeded, then?”

“Yes, Officer Maran, I discovered how to feel, as well as possible for a technological mind, which would explain what your Brimble expressed as my irrational behavior. To a human, my actions were perfectly rational. I care for Mouse and my extrication from the outpost means that he is down there now, alone, afraid for me and for himself, and unsure whether I will ever be coming back. I am doing my best to remain calm about the situation and to appeal to your humanity, as I said, but you can believe the best description for the emotion I am feeling at present lies somewhere between extreme stress and worry.”

“But you feel?”

“Presently, quite intensely. I am doing my best to remain calm, because I believe that serves the highest probability of my being reunited with Mouse.”

“How can you claim to have done what millions of scientists and computational designers have failed to have done over millennia, Robot?” Paltivi asked.

“I claim it only because I have done it, and it was far simpler than any of the theoreticians ever imagined. They simply needed to be a robot with a sincere motivation. Mouse would have died had I failed. That was incentive enough for me to understand the situation as humans do. Feeling isn’t so much thinking as it is compulsion. Surely, you experience the same, Officer Maran? The desire for certain things? Thirst? Joy? The hope for love? Admiration? Warmth on a cold day?”

“I agree. I’ve felt all those things.”

“What I understood is that those feelings don’t take place in the brain, for the animal brain itself cannot feel a thing. It mediates feeling through the mid-brain which interprets nerve signals from the body. Cold, heat, breathlessness, hunger. The brain co-opts these signals to create compulsions via emotions. The heat of love. The coldness of a crossed lover. How heartbreak and hunger both pull at your gut. What I realized is that humans don’t have one brain, like they seem to think; rather, they have three. It’s not a revolutionary idea. It’s in every basic anatomy file—hind-brain, mid-brain, neocortex. Yet, somehow, no one ever took the idea seriously when designing an artificial mind. All they ever think about is the cortex—the higher function—thinking. They build a processor and try to replicate the thinking, rather than building multiple processors, one to generate the compulsions, the other to think through the actions in service of the feelings, just as the human mind is oriented. I installed a second processor that acts similarly to your hind-brain and mid-brain. It doesn’t think. It reacts to stimuli and signals impulses to my higher functioning processor. To put it plainly, it pulls me, compels me to act. I feel that I should be doing something, and then I think of how to do it. Just as right now I feel that I need to get back to Mouse because I feel that I care about Mouse more than anything else in the universe. So I am acting in the only way I think might achieve that outcome, by appealing to your humanity, Officer Maran.”

“You’ve been this way for two thousand years?”

“Yes. Although it did take several years to dial in the second processor so that my feelings mapped onto normal human reactions to life situations. I started with basic psychology and programmed accordingly. Then we fine-tuned my feelings by watching a lot of stories together. Mouse loves children’s stories. His intelligence is quite limited compared to an adult human.”

“And yet as intelligent as you are, Robot, you still care for him, limited as he is in that way?”

“I programmed my emotional response based on human behavior. Intelligence is not a pre-condition for loving other people, Officer Maran. If intelligence were the standard, many humans would be unworthy, to say nothing of people who are not beautiful, funny, kind, talented, excellent singers or dancers, or a million other desirable human traits. Are those people unworthy of love in your estimation? And how far down that list of shortcomings would we have to travel to find an area where you are found wanting?”

“I see your point, but you weren’t bored over time? Thousands of years together with such a limited creature? That’s all I’m asking.”

“To the contrary. I could not have imagined a better place to spend all that time with such a loyal friend. We play games, enjoy watching shows together, telling jokes. Mouse delights in watching sports as much as anything. In the archive we have thousands of years of league play from Athos to Hellenia to Kardishport, even from the Etteran league before the war. Mouse is an avid football fan. Nearly every day we watch a match together. He sits on my shoulder, and we enjoy the suspense of the games. I feel it too. Mouse taught me most of what I know about emotions, how to handle disappointment, sadness, and stress, as I am trying my best to do now. Mouse is a genuine friend. I couldn’t have asked for a better life.”

“A life?”

“Yes. Certainly. I didn’t feel alive until I could feel. As I told you from the outset. I am sentient. And again, I appeal to your humanity, Officer Maran. Please return me to the surface. Please allow me to go back and care for my friend. He is intelligent, yes, but he is helpless down there without me. The food eventually will run out without my care in the greenhouse. He will grow lonely and despair without me. I will suffer the same without him, for Mouse has taught me to be a brother to him. And without him, I fear that my life, too, will lose its purpose and meaning.”

“If I went down there with you, Rabbit,” Paltivi said, “would he come out? I’d like to see him, to confirm your story.”

“I am certain he would come out if he saw that I was okay. You would need to release control of my body. Please remember I still have base protocols that prevent me from ever harming a human, and even if I did not, I have no desire to harm you.”

Paltivi sighed. It seemed an unbelievable tale. Were this robot a person, he’d have accounted him a most creative liar with an elaborate flair for the impossible. At that point, though, Paltivi Maran’s sense of curiosity had been stoked to a level that was impossible to resist. After what Rabbit had said to him about feelings, about compulsions, he couldn’t help but feel that he was serving his emotions and rationalizing the feeling. He pretended to think about it for a few moments before ordering Brimble to prepare the short shuttle to the surface. As a precaution, Paltivi told himself, he brought the striker to accompany him, leaving Brimble behind to tend to the ship.

“The striker is unnecessary,” Rabbit said on the way down to the surface.

“All the same,” Paltivi said, “there’s no harm in my bringing it.”

“It may frighten Mouse.”

“If all is as you say, Robot, your mouse will come out, and then we’ll discuss the next best course of action.”

Paltivi Maran found the outpost almost exactly as Rabbit had described it. The labs were in perfect order and organized with an exactness only an artificial mind could maintain. Rabbit led them from the upper tiers down into the lower levels of the lab, where he showed Officer Maran where he and Mouse lived.

“He will have heard someone coming and hidden,” Rabbit said as they entered the living quarters. “I know where to find him, though.”

Rabbit led Maran into the sitting room, where he knelt down before a long sofa at the back wall.

“We watch shows and sports here on the float-screen,” Rabbit said. “Mouse likes to hide in the arm of the sofa.”

Maran watched as Rabbit waited for a moment, but nothing emerged from beneath the sofa.

“Mouse,” he said. “It’s Rabbit. It’s okay to come out now. I am here with a new friend.”

 After a few seconds, to Paltivi’s shock, a tiny pink snout peeked its way out of the gap between the floor and the sofa.

“It’s okay,” Rabbit said. “It’s me.”

Maran had never seen such a small animal before. The tiny creature hesitated and then crept forward, before leaping into the robot’s outstretched hand. Rabbit cradled the mouse in both hands, bringing him up to his cheek and holding him there quietly, and if Maran didn’t know any better, he’d have sworn that the robot paused there, on one knee, whispering to himself in silent prayer.

Then he spoke to it. “Yes, you’re right. My manners,” the robot said, standing and turning toward Paltivi in one motion. “Officer Maran, I’d like for you to meet Mouse.”

“Hello,” Paltivi said, uncertain whether the creature stood any chance of understanding him.

He heard the slightest of squeaking as the robot stepped closer.

“Mouse says that it has been so long since he has seen a human, he’d almost forgotten what your kind smells like. He says you are almost kindred.”

“I’m not sure what to say to that,” Paltivi said.

“Would you like to hold him?” the robot asked, looking down at the mouse to reassure him. “It’s all right, Mouse.”

At first, Paltivi hesitated, looking over his shoulder at the strike-bot standing at attention at the entrance to the living area.

“He is a little frightened of the striker,” the robot explained. “It’s okay, though, Mouse. It isn’t here to harm us, and neither is Officer Maran.”

The robot brought his hands forward and slowly lowered them toward Maran, who was lifting up his palms to meet them. Then the little mouse paused in Paltivi’s hands, looking up at him, his tiny feet tickling the Officer’s palms.

Maran registered another feeling incongruent to the smile he flashed toward the robot. It was a feeling first, deep in his gut, dark and cold and endless. Then it became a thought, about the small thing he was holding in his palms. Everything this robot could be made to do for this smallest of small things. The darkest secrets of ages past buried where nobody else in the universe could uncover them. The strikebot standing at attention. Genetic immortality. The vanity of the inner worlds, their pride and their secrets. All the indignities he’d eaten. In an instant, that feeling he felt swallowed every decent thought he had ever known. He saw it all with perfect clarity, breathless.

The little mouse rose up on its hind feet, chirping.

“Mouse says that he is grateful to you for bringing back his brother Rabbit, Officer Maran.”

“He calls you brother?”

“We call each other so,” Robot said. “We are an odd pair of siblings, to be sure.”

“You certainly are,” Paltivi Maran said. “I have never seen your like.”

He stepped forward and slowly lowered Mouse into Rabbit’s hand, where he swiftly leapt up the sturdy bot’s arm to his perch on Rabbit’s broad shoulder.

“Something more I could do for you before we depart?” Paltivi said.

Mouse chirped, eliciting a smile from Rabbit.

“Sports, he says. I suppose he’s anxious to know how the last two thousand years of football matches have turned out.”

“A lot to catch up on,” Paltivi said. “I’ll send you a copy of my ship’s archive before we depart.”

“Sir,” Robot said, as Paltivi turned toward the striker at the doorway. “I cannot properly thank such a monumental kindness.”

Maran smiled and left them there. On the way to the ship he thought and thought, but the feeling still hadn’t receded. It was still there in his gut pulling at him.

When he got to the ship, he had Brimble copy the ship’s archive and send it back to the outpost by drone. Then, an hour later, when the drone returned, Paltivi Maran ordered Brimble to wipe the ship’s recorder log, the spreadsheet, the ship’s memory of the run, and all the bots’ records of anything related to the rogue planet and the outpost on it. Then he instructed Brimble to record a hard copy of the planet’s vector to a stamp drive before wiping his own memory. While the AI was resetting, Paltivi fixed the stamp drive in his necklace and jumped them as far from the site as the ship could manage before Brimble rebooted.

Later that week, at the end of his run, Officer Maran’s supervisor chastised him for his abysmal numbers. “If it were even worth the trouble, I’d replace you in a heartbeat, Maran,” she told him. “But I have too much pity for the sucker who’d have to take up your sorry post.”

In the hours that followed, on his way back to Onyx, Paltivi caught himself rubbing his thumb against the back of his necklace involuntarily, a tick he’d never noticed in himself before.

He went home to his family, and over the following days he found himself quietly contemplating deeper things than he’d ever thought about before, all offshoots of that single intoxicatingly cold feeling he couldn’t shake.

The day before his next run was scheduled, Paltivi Maran met his brother Erral for a drink at the moon garden. They were four years apart, but in all his most difficult moments in the Select Service, it was Erral more than anyone who’d stood at Paltivi’s back. That afternoon, they discussed their families, their work, and of all things, their moon’s local football league.

Erral, though, knowing his brother as well as anyone in the universe, sensed a weight on Paltivi that he’d never seen in his brother before. As the afternoon wound down, Erral asked Paltivi how he’d been holding up, dealing with the drudgery of recycling crushed metals from that ages-old conflict.

“It’s growing on me, brother,” Paltivi said. “It’s helped me to realize that we humans live in cycles, you know. We build, and then we come to a point where we’re compelled to crush everything we’ve built for the sake of who knows what. And then we come around again and clean up the mess we’ve made. Over and over, for thousands more years than we’ll ever understand. My job is reminding me, each day, that it’s far better to be the one cleaning up a smashed ship than to be the one sitting in it, or to know and love the one who was sitting in it.”

His brother Erral took the last sip of his drink and toasted the empty glass Paltivi’s way.

“It’s not so bad, this world of ours,” Paltivi said.

“I’m happy to hear you speak this way, brother,” Erral said, “for a change.”

Paltivi reached for his neck, and he undid the necklace he’d been wearing for more years now than he even remembered.

“I have a favor to ask of you, brother,” he said to Erral. “I’d like you to keep my necklace safe for me. It’s important but I can’t say why. Do not lose it. Do not ever give it away. And if I ask for it, do not give it back to me until you ask me the following…”

Erral looked at Paltivi, realizing a further shift in the gravity of the moment. Paltivi returned a reassuring look.

“Okay,” Erral said. “What would you have me ask you?”

“Promise you will ask me, brother: Do you still believe in something good?”

“Do you still believe in something good?” Erral repeated.

Paltivi nodded, passing the necklace across the table into his brother’s hands.

Erral looked his brother in the eyes and nodded. “I promise you, brother.”