“Well, I finished The Fall of Watertower, which I think turned out pretty good. But I mean, I don’t really know what to do with it. Because, you know, your friend…”
“My friend?”
“Well, she’s…dead. I mean, she was on Watertower, and Watertower got blown up, so I figured, you know…”
Oh, right. The friend. Well, if the destruction of Watertower has a bright spot, it’s that Sarya’s web of lies has become far simpler.
“Sorry for your loss, by the way,” says Helper. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
The headache has been throbbing with every word, and this reminder of her former home has not helped. Probably it’s a bad sign that her primary reaction is not sorrow but annoyance. Now she’s going to have to come up with a brand new way to keep Helper motivated. Although now that she thinks about it…does she need to? It seems silly now, having a sub-legal caretaker intelligence doing research on legends when she has the real thing now, scarcely a blade’s width away. The truth is locked in that goddess-damned Vault sitting over there. Yes, you, the light show. A smug-looking device if ever she’s seen one, probably pleased that she’s devoted every waking moment to it. Low-tiers love attention—don’t they, Vault? Low-tiers adore this kind of thing. This one is obviously enjoying locking her out of her birthright, preventing her from making the greatest discovery since—
“What if I turn off the lights?” asks Helper.
Sarya’s mouth, which had opened to tell Helper exactly what it could do with itself, closes again. Turn off the lights and plunge this room into complete darkness while she racks her mind for nightmares? Her first reaction is: that is a terrible idea. Her second, barely a second later, is that this might be the best idea Helper has ever had. “Do it,” she says.
The total blackness into which she is dropped is, perhaps, more than she was prepared for. Her Network unit throws its usual pale lines over the walls and floor, but they don’t do much to chase the blackness. They emphasize it, if anything, and her anger is quickly drowned in a rising tide of panic. But this isn’t Sarya’s first brush with darkness, and she knows how to deal with it. You keep your head above it, for one thing. And then you focus on something—something real. Like this splash of color, the orange globe of light lying at the other end of her bunk. Note the detail in its slowly shifting sphere of symbols. Think about how it came to be. It’s all virtual, just the work of a tiny projector, but isn’t it interesting how much effort her Network unit has gone to just to make it look realistic? Look at that slight glow on the underside of the upper bunk, the ripples of color on her clothing. It’s hard to believe she is sitting in complete darkness right now, that if she took the little projector off her forehead she would be left in a void so perfect that—
Nope.
“How’s that?” asks Helper. “How did I do?”
She is not about to admit this to the little intelligence, but its normally annoying voice is actually somewhat comforting in the darkness. “You…did great, Helper,” she says, deciding even as she says it that this will be her absolute last attempt for the night. Then she’ll have Helper turn the lights up a little, just enough to sleep. Hear that, mind? You’ll get your sleep. You just have to do one little thing first. Just hand over that one teensy memory, whatever it is. It’s in there, she knows it is. She’ll just avert her attention, just sit quietly and wait, and the memory will just pop up like a bubble. See how clear you can be, mind? See how relaxed, how empty, how—
“I’ve been thinking,” says Helper. “Now that my user is a little older—and, you know, I’ll maybe be getting new responsibilities and stuff—maybe it’s time for…a new name?”
The only thing that stops Sarya from ripping her Network unit from her head and flinging it across the room is the fact that she would be left, sightless and deaf, in utter darkness. Her second impulse, hot on the heels of the first, is not just to silence Helper but to reset it entirely. She could start from scratch tomorrow, if she really feels the need to be irritated. She progresses through a half dozen other notions, each more extreme than the last, and finally finds that she is just too tired to handle anything more than a simple dull annoyance. “A new name,” she says in a dead voice.
“I mean, it could be anything you want,” says Helper. “Anything at all. I mean, I’m just a random sub-legal intelligence.”
“Anything?”
“Of course!” says Helper. “Or Ace. I mean, your choice.”
Sarya stares into the darkness, at the little icon in her overlay that represents Sarya’s Little Helper. “You want to be called Ace,” she says.
“Well,” says Helper more quietly, “I mean, if you want to call me that.”
Does every sub-legal intelligence harbor secret desires and motivations? How long has Helper wanted a name? This specific name? It’s stupid, of course. It’s just a low-tier intelligence. But then so is Eleven, right?
“All right,” she says. It’s an easy win, and it’ll give her some currency for future requests. Remember that time I let you pick your name? “Fine.”
“Really?”
“Really. Sarya’s Little Helper, set your name to Ace.”
“And…pronouns too?” asks the former Sarya’s Little Helper hopefully.
Why not. “Sure,” she says. “Which ones do you—”
“He,” says the voice instantly. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think definitely he.”
“Okay. Sarya’s Lit—Ace—set your pronouns to the he family.”
“Ace here!” says the voice in her ears, sounding exuberant even for it—for him, rather. “Pronouns: he family! Nice to meet you! How can I, Ace, improve your evening?”
Sarya blinks at the eagerness in the small voice. How did she not think of this earlier? Just from a logistical point of view, if you want to keep a low-tier productive, wish fulfillment is a whole lot easier than keeping your lies straight. Especially if it costs you next to nothing.
“Well…Ace,” says Sarya, dropping her voice to a more serious-sounding pitch, “I have something I’m working on here. And it is super important that I not be disturbed.”
“All right,” whispers Ace in return. “How can I, Ace, help?”
“Ace,” she says, “the first step is very important. I need quiet.”
“You…don’t want to talk to me?”
Oh, for the goddess’s sake, here we go. “Not you,” she says, thinking quickly. “Everybody else.”