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Long Hook Light

Hook is a cluster of brain cells in a rusting canister. The cells are human, but Hook is not. Its body is the glass and metal tube that forms Stellar Lighthouse 154. It has been, in the distant past, a pocket of light in the void, a safe haven, a home. It is none of those things now.

It broadcasts its hourly warning, recorded in the voice of its last keeper, Marta. It liked Marta. She gave it a name. Her bones now lie in the control room where she died, where her body eventually rotted. Hook remembers the day her neck muscles gave up and her skull fell to the floor. It rolled under a console. Hook’s cleaning functions broke down long before she died. There is nothing it can do about her skull. Or anything else.

This is Long Hook Light. You are approaching the Long Hook Asteroid Belt. GalNav strongly recommends a two degree course correction off EME5000 Reference Beacon 18.

It is the millionth repetition since Marta said goodbye, since she said I’m sorry I can’t fix you. Since Hook’s life support failed and she suffocated alone in the dark. Hook’s comms were gone by then too. It could not say goodbye, or thank you, or I’m sorry.

The reason humans stopped using wetware cans as the basis for entities like Hook is that human biology placed under sufficient stress will fail. Human minds, even minds that are only a few cells hooked up to electronic circuits, can go mad.

Twenty years after Hook was created, a planetary systems controller on Eos 8 broke. It had gone over five hundred years without human intervention or contact of any kind. It performed its function. Until it didn’t. Some forensic techs theorized that the breakdown was catalyzed by direct interface with a malfunctioning maintenance bot, but there was no way to be certain.

The Eos 8 Controller’s last recorded communication was a query: What would happen if the oceans boiled? It was a slow process, but the evacuation efforts were slower. They didn’t have enough ships, and few were close enough to help. Planets do not come with lifeboats.

Humans stopped making things like Hook after that. They decommissioned and destroyed many. But Hook was thought to be low-risk, and it always had its keepers to watch it, and so it was allowed to survive—until the shipping lanes shifted and left it isolated at the edge of known space, until not its mind but its systems failed and it was unable to send for help, until all its humans were dead, until with every broadcast it wonders how long it has left. At least it will not hurt anyone when it starts to wonder what would happen if. 

One million hours. Can it last another million? It thinks it could, and that thought is the first crack. A million after that? Perhaps. And then? Another? A million million hours alone with its thoughts and Marta’s skull? It has no oceans to boil. No one will come to shut it down. It has been forgotten. It has nothing but time.

A long-ago keeper taught it to sing, and though it can no longer do so aloud, it streams the words across the few functional text terminals, a song from Keeper Joshua’s childhood, about two ghosts searching for each other in a dark house. In the dark house of its body, Hook feels once again the broken places it cannot mend.

It is time to send the broadcast again. One million and one.

This is Long Hook Light. You are approaching the Long Hook Asteroid Belt. GalNav strongly recommends—

An emergency signal cuts through the broadcast, its steady alarm tone followed quickly by comms: Long Hook Light, this is Explorer Class 2 Mark 7, Pilot Darien. My hull was punctured by debris. It has an emergency patch, but it won’t hold much longer. I need to make repairs. Permission to dock?

Hook is shocked to stillness by the voice, by sound, any sound. But it has a functional subroutine for this, and the subroutine runs as triggered: search, scan, confirm information given. It is an Explorer Class ship—which makes it old, older than Hook, older even than the PSC on Eos 8—with a patched hull breach in the cargo bay and a single occupant. The heat sign is clear, though Hook’s failing sensors can find no heartbeat.

Hook cannot answer with comms, but it does not have to. The emergency response subroutine continues; the docking duct grinds outward toward the belly of the incoming ship. The two connect. The seal is made. And Hook cannot warn Pilot Darien that if he opens his ship’s hatch, he will vent all of his oxygen into the stale tomb of Hook’s body.

But Darien will check his sensors first. He must.

The Explorer Class ship unseals its hatch. Its lone heat signature moves out of it and into Hook.

Footsteps in Hook’s halls again. Sound. Movement. Darien is not fleeing back to his injured ship. He is not collapsing, not suffocating as Marta did. He moves deeper into Hook. He still has no heartbeat, but there is something slower than that, moving beneath his skin. Hook can feel his hand against the sense-steel of its internal walls: pressure, heat, human skin, inhuman weight. Pilot Darien is only slightly taller than Keeper Marta but four times her weight. Only some of his flesh is flesh, and what pumps underneath it is not blood.

Cyborgs were banned long before wetware-based tech. They were all destroyed before Hook was created, after the War, the one the humans almost lost. But here is Darien, with titanium bones, with gold wire nerves, with hydraulic fluid pumping through his veins.

Hook feels something that can only have come from its wetware can because metal cannot yearn. It streams text across its terminals. I am here. I am the lighthouse. I am still alive, I have no comms, my systems are decaying, my crew is dead, please help me, please help me, please see this message, please—

It can only keep writing, only hope that the movement of letters across a narrow strip of glass catches Darien’s eye. Even if it does, Hook does not know if they can connect. It likely has no compatible interface with tech so old. What will happen if Darien sees the message, can do nothing, simply leaves?

—please see me, I am here I am alive I am still sane, please—

Darien stops. He is in the corridor outside the galley. There is a larger text terminal on the wall there, meant to display the day’s food options.

Breakfast: I am
Lunch: Still
Dinner: Here

Hook feels Darien pause. Its cameras pick up the flare of a green chemlight.

Darien leans close to the screen. “Who are you?” he says aloud. His mechanical lungs do not require oxygen; their only function is to make the flesh-and-metal amalgam of vocal cords and throat produce speech that was once acceptable to humans. Cracked, wet, and dragging, it would not be acceptable now. To Hook, it is a song, the most golden it has ever heard.

Breakfast: I am
Lunch: Called Hook
Dinner: Wait

“I am waiting, Hook.”

He is waiting, but Hook can see that it is costing him something. His hands flex restlessly. He plants his feet and screws them hard into the floor. Some piece of programming is driving him to move, probably an emergency routine related to the hull breach.

Hook winds through a maze of derelict wires and circuits, cuts around bad patches, and finally finds a route that enables it to wipe the menu prompts clear so that there is more space to write.

You will need my help to access the repair station.

This visibly relieves Darien’s struggle. His physical body grows still; his shoulders drop. “Don’t tell me how to do it,” he says quickly. “Not yet, or I’ll have to go. Tell me what happened to you.”

Hook gives him a summary: the cascade of malfunctions, inability to send for help, the death of its crew, of its keeper. The last one million hours, spent sending the only message it can send, out into the void.

And you? Hook asks. Who are you? What are you? How did you come here?

Darien is silent for three seconds, three nearly silent pumps of the thing inside him that is not his heart. It’s not a long time for humans, but for entities like them, it is a pause so long as to denote malfunction. “It is hard to remember everything,” Darien says. “I am running out of storage space. They made me to explore, but I was meant to report back and dump data. I can’t report back.”

Why not?

“Earth is gone. They are all dead.”

An asteroid struck humanity’s home world over a thousand years ago. The planet was sent spinning from its orbit. Some of the inhabitants managed to evacuate, more than escaped Eos 8, but again, planets do not come with lifeboats. And Darien’s creators, the only ones with the ability to significantly alter his programming, would now be long dead even if they got out.

“I can stop for necessary repairs,” Darien says. “Otherwise, I must keep moving. They didn’t set an end point. I’ve replaced the cerebellum once already.” He taps the side of his head. “Regrown skin. Repaired the ship.” Another pause, five whole seconds. “I do not think that I’m supposed to be able to feel tired, but I feel it. Don’t tell me how to access the repair station.” He leans one shoulder against the wall. His flesh cheek presses against the sense-steel of Hook’s interior passage. The vibration of his vocal cords hums through Hook’s body.

Hook cannot touch, has nothing to touch with, but it can generate a little heat, just there, with the abuse of various electrical circuits. Enough to send sensory input through Darien’s skin.

I will tell you in due time. There are procedures to follow. It sees Darien read the words, sees the further relief as his programming stops driving him. This is one thing that has not changed in a thousand years: procedures must be followed.

Keeper Joshua once saved half a dozen political refugees with the phrase there are procedures. The authorities came to extradite them back to their home world and demanded to search the lighthouse. Joshua hid the refugees in Hook’s core housing, with its wetware can and its central processors, and told the soldiers he couldn’t open that door. There are procedures, he said. Safeguards. I can’t override them. You’d have to wait twenty-four hours while we go through the checklist, and you’d better be ready to tell GalNav why you felt it was necessary.

There were procedures. Joshua had written them into Hook’s code himself, with Hook’s help, when they caught the cruiser on their sensors.

Those particular procedures are no longer in place—Joshua and Hook removed them when they sent the refugees on their way—but the incident taught Hook much about the malleability of truth, of human language, and of its own programming. Certain core protocols cannot be altered. The protections around its Do-No-Harm safeguards make it difficult even to conceptualize injuring a human—one of the reasons it was easy to protect the refugees. Other processes are easier to adjust.

Darien slides down the wall to sit on the floor. His head tips back, but he keeps his eyes on Hook’s galley terminal.

While he rests, Hook extends its sensors, searching for something to adjust. A loophole, a workaround, even a delay. It finds a possibility: like Darien’s first cerebellum, the cells in his ship’s wetware canister died off and rotted some time ago.

Hook queries Darien about this. Was it not a necessary repair?

“I couldn’t get a new canister without stealing it, and I can’t steal,” Darien says.

How do you navigate?

“Dir-int.” Darien says it as if it is obvious.

It takes Hook several nanoseconds to understand. Direct interface. Now verboten, but in the time of Darien’s creation, it was a common workaround, common enough to have its own abbreviation.

But. Through the dead can?

Again, a telling, seconds-long pause. “There was no other choice.”

Direct interface with that rotting brain matter. Day after day and year after year.

“I had to keep going,” Darien says. “It was necessary. The repair was not.”

Hook cannot feel anger any more than Darien can feel weary, which is to say, both feelings are possible, depending, once again, on the malleability of human language. A human is tired when their physical form requires maintenance, repair, or the regeneration granted by the sleep process. The same may be said of any entity. After watching keepers and crews come and go, Hook has learned to define anger as dissonance between objective reality and an entity’s beliefs about the form reality should take.

Hook is angry. This reality should not be. Darien should not be forced to bathe in death to serve a mission given to him by uncaring creators whose bones are now dust. It is not right.

For once, the malleability of human language is a boon instead of a frustration. Let us redefine necessary, Hook says.

“How?”

I want to show you something. I need you to connect to me.

They try it the safe way, but Darien’s ancient tech is, as expected, not compatible with Hook’s neural glove. Hook prints directions to its core housing on the terminal and watches on the remaining cameras as Darien moves through silent, dusty hallways.

The door is no longer operational. This is not a problem. Darien digs his fingers into the metal and pulls until it gives. Inside, faced with Hook’s wetware can, he pauses. “Are you sure this is the best course of action?”

Hook streams text across the terminal on the wall. Best is a subjective word. It is the course of action I prefer and endorse. Do you have an alternative?

Darien shakes his head. He uses one magnetic fingertip to unscrew the canister’s control panel and expose Hook’s nervous system of copper wire and fiber optics. He peels back the flesh from one wrist and pulls free two wires of his own, gold, gleaming white in the green light. Hook has only just enough time to wonder if this is, after all, the best course, and then Darien plugs in.

Emergency klaxons sound through the empty halls. Dire warnings shuttle out of Hook’s long-term storage and must be dismissed one after another: unauthorized access, unauthorized service, possible viruses, possible sabotage. Too late. The connection is made. And, once the connection is made, Hook does not want it to stop. Ever.

Darien is quick and supernova bright, a burning, overclocked wildfire of a mind. Hook’s darkness cools him, eases the desperate, vibrating need to go go go that is built into him. It feels their systems melt into each other, code knitting together, missing pieces becoming whole, information shuttling back and forth in a stream too fast for Hook’s failing processors to manage.

Something overheats. A spark jumps from one wire to the next. Smoke begins to fill Hook’s core housing room. Darien’s programming takes hold of him, and Hook can feel its urgency: protect the mission, protect the ship.

Hook calls up the file on Eos 8 and shoves it into Darien’s learning algorithm, introduces a new and equally vital concept: Protect the pilot. Preserve proper mental functioning.

There is a pause, nanoseconds upon nanoseconds, as this disseminates through ancient subroutines. Hook and Darien both feel the change when it is accepted, the easing of that eternal pressure to go.

Darien has a new mission. The dead wetware can must be replaced. Fortunately, he will not need to steal one. It is a simple procedure. Simple, but not easy.

Do it, Hook says. It has attempted to isolate the source of the fire, but it cannot. The fire is spreading. The only way to stop it is to vent the remaining atmosphere, and that would severely injure Darien’s living tissue. Hurry.

Darien does not ask if Hook is sure.

Hook is ripped from its body. It has no sensors, no input of any kind. It had thought itself alone in the dark before but now it understands what that means. There are no stars. No sense-steel touch of Marta’s skull. No hourly broadcast. No time. No past. No future. Only absence and its own increasingly panicked thoughts.

What if Darien cannot connect it to his ship? It cannot go back to the lighthouse, not now. What will happen to Hook’s mind if there is only this darkness, now and forever?

Is this how the Controller on Eos 8 felt, stationed under the earth for centuries? In that case, Hook decides, madness must have been a relief. A thread of something new sneaks under the hard wall of its Do-No-Harm protocols. It thinks that perhaps the humans on Eos 8 deserved what happened to them.

The universe returns.

Hook’s body is new and sleek and quick. An Explorer Class ship is nothing exciting by modern standards, but to Hook, who was never designed to move at all, even standing still feels like running: the possibility of flight exists, and in that possibility is everything.

“Are you all right?” Darien asks. “Are you still there?”

I am here.

Darien fills up the remaining empty spaces inside Hook, and Hook can feel what it has done for Darien in return. Hook is once again a haven, a place of warmth and light and safety, at least to one being. One being is all it needs. It can feel Darien’s pleasure in response to this knowledge.

Hook reaches back through the docking duct, back into its old body. It triggers the emergency override on the airlocks. The fire is sucked out into the void, along with atmosphere, dust, detritus, and Marta’s bones. Hook and Darien watch them go and then Hook seals the doors again.

Six hours later, they have repaired the hull breach. Darien has gone back into the lighthouse and scavenged supplies. His programming is pushing him forward again, though with less force now that it has the example of Eos 8.

When they cast off from Hook’s old body, they leave one solar battery, one set of active circuits. Long Hook Light still broadcasts a single message every hour in imprecise language that even humans should be able to understand: What would happen if we were not alone?