The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

– Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1, by William Shakespeare

Just breathe. You’re not dying.

Not dying.

I’m repeating these words in my mind to keep myself, if not calm, then at least temporarily in control of my fear. It clutches at my chest, constricts my throat, plays on my body as if I were composed of thousands of tightly stretched strings.

I see the creature skittering toward us through the vastness that fills me with dread. But if I focus on its approach, I don’t have to think about all the empty space around us.

The landscape is not just terrifyingly big; it’s also all wrong, an affront to human eyes. I have searched through collections of old Earth paintings to find something, anything, that resembles this: jagged rocks like giant shards rise up from the undulating ground, all the angles off, all the outlines strangely twisted. Their proportions and distances are misleading. It’s the reflections that are the worst, though. Some of the newer ice is shiny and reflecting, creating a perilous illusion of depth. Out here, human eyes, or rather what the brain makes of what they see, are useless.

Escher; that’s who I found. There was no actual resemblance to the landscape in front of me, but I got the same sense of vertigo from him. I also discovered lots of AI-generated landscapes, more similar to the real one, but falling strangely flat; no vertigo there.

Familiar anxiety clutches at my chest as the approaching creature emerges from the sharply defined shadow of one of the nearest shards. That is something, in this utterly alien land, that looks familiar to the human eye, and yet it’s the most alien sight here.

It looks like an ant. The resemblance is striking, all the way to the mandibles and the antennae. Theses on convergent evolution have lately been springing up like mushrooms after a rain, not that I ever saw mushrooms in the wild. Or rain, for that matter.

It’s close enough now that I can see it’s carrying something in its mandibles. Another gift; another puzzle. Or are these descriptions so far off that we’re in deep water?

It stops some twenty meters away. They never get any closer. If I took a step forward, it would probably back off; at least that’s what has always happened before.

I clutch my handheld Raman spec. My suit is recording, the visor showing me a range of data to view or measurements to take. As if we hadn’t radar- and lidar-mapped every inch of this area, hadn’t measured local temperature fluctuations and surface composition countless times. This patch might be better known than most places on Mother Earth.

The critter is another matter entirely.

It lays down its … offering?

Small, barely an arm’s length. Shiny. Polished, even. A worked slab of rock? What is it?

There appears to be something on its surface. Carvings? Writings? We’ve seen nothing like that before. My suit takes snapshots, while I stand there feeling stupid and very, very dizzy.

Increasingly dizzy, in fact.

Despite myself, I breathe harder. My stomach knots and twists.

I’m not dying.

Better not throw up; what a stupid way to potentially kill myself.

I let the suit increase my meds, and try to focus on the artifact and its bearer. The “ant” seems to just stare at it. If our guess as to where its eyes are has been correct.

It stares.

We stare.

Oh yes, we. Me and my unwelcome companion, standing a few meters from me in an identical space suit, thinking gods knew what about the creature facing us.

Before I signed up for this, I should have known that it would become political. After all, isn’t possible first contact the ultimate politics?

Of course they wanted in. Especially as they’d discovered the ants earlier than we did. A shame, but true.

After what seems like an eternity in the vast cold land, the ant moves. It’s a strange motion: each of its legs moves out of sync with the other ones, following its own intricate trajectory.

The dance again.

The suit tells me it’s the same pattern as before. And before that. And before …

This time, though, I glimpse an unexpected motion in the periphery of my visor’s field. The suited figure beside me moves. Her motion is so swift and elegant that it shouldn’t even be possible in the bulky space suit.

She joins the ant’s dance.

“Wait, no!” I shriek on the shared frequency.

Too late.

I loathe the life I have been brought into, a prison of oxygen and food, but at least I can say that I’m myself. A human. Not all Earth-descendants in the system can claim that.

The rift opened well before my time. Several rifts, in fact. Not everyone tolerated AIsistant implants well. Others grew too dependent on them.

That wasn’t what divided us, though.

When I was selected to investigate the ants in situ, I was full of awe as well as some trepidation. When, a few days later, I learned that I’ll be accompanied by one of them this whole time, I was also scared.

Others also got their assigned colleagues. Mine is named Abigail. What a normal human name for the chimeric creature occupying the space suit. Not a human—too much artificial stuff in her skull—and not just an AI—too much fragile wetware connecting to it. The worst of both worlds, isn’t it?

I only meet Abigail outside, both of us suited. I can barely glimpse her face. Our only exchanges are on radio. I’m grateful; I don’t trust her kind.

But this is neutral ground, not one of the exclusively human or Joined settlements in the local asteroid belt. Initially, this was one of the planets we were supposed to settle if found suitable. Instead, this one was found already inhabited.

What a nice surprise: upon traveling two hundred years to our destination, we found that not one of the prospective worlds here was suitable for human settlements. Forced to settle the asteroids, we could have stayed around old Sol!

This one was a particular disappointment. We could have tried here, but they, the linkheads, noticed peculiar underground structures—and eventually their inhabitants. If events on the Gaia hadn’t been enough to divide, this would have been, for some. It’s no secret that many would have been happy if the ants had been conveniently overlooked. That would have been easy. The surface betrays no sign of civilization, technical or pre-tech. Radar, though, confirms the underground structures. But little to no heat emissions, nothing indicative of industry …. We sent probes, and finally landed ourselves. A single ant appeared at the landing site. Then, our encounters began.

Detailed guidelines for potential first contact exist. They had also been drafted on Earth, more than two centuries ago and lacking all context. They require observations we cannot make, instruments we no longer possess, and time we don’t have. We are being cautious, but within the confines of our situation.

For if we wait and wait, we might die off first.

She’s dancing on the ice.

She swirls, tracing a complex pattern. She must have added something to her boots, like blades, because she’s leaving lines on the icy surface, as if she’s drawing something.

Voices are screaming on the radio, asking for an explanation, but my attention is elsewhere.

Because the ant stops and watches.

The ant watches.

It doesn’t finish its alien choreography.

It makes no move to retreat.

It doesn’t move toward her either. Just watches (probably). It’s impossible to spot anything indicating interest. Everything is our conjecture.

Everything has been a conjecture since, two centuries ago, we had been doomed by our ancestors.

A generation ship. What a fancy name for a prison.

I know; most people in Solar System habitats have also never walked unsuited under open skies. But their lives are anchored to their central star, to the myriad of its worlds upon which they can stand. They always have the option of retreating to Earth, though for some the adaptation would threaten to kill them.

No such thing for us. Imprisoned in a glorified tin can, with no option but to keep the engines beneath our feet running smoothly or commit mass suicide or genocide. Nothing to go on but the dream of our destination.

No wonder we turned on each other.

People had wanted Gaia to succeed so badly. But when the engines misfired in a technical failure, the mainframe AI had the option to either seal the adjoining sections, killing everyone in them, and condemn the repairs team to certain death, or shut down the engines to save all those lives, but prolong the mission for everyone; within acceptable duration margins, but risking more failures. Right there, at its decision then, began the divide between regular humans and the Joined, who fell in line with everything the ship did and suggested far too easily to others’ taste.

What did all the noble ideas behind the mission come down to?

Survival. That’s what we had to do here. We were forced to; other options had been taken from us generations ago. Or, in one instance, not quite so long ago.

The evidence of it is fucking dancing before me.

Abigail stops. All around her are swirling lines and spirals.

The ant regards it for a moment, then turns and leaves.

“What the fuck did you just do?” I breathe out.

“An educated guess.”

I tune again to the frequency connecting me with the rest of my team.

“… hear me? Stella, I repeat, can you hear me? What the fuck did that linkhead just do?”

“I have just asked her the same question. Educated guess, she said. Relax, I’ll ask for details.”

“She might have botched everything!”

There’s nothing to botch yet, I think. We meet here; they bring offerings, never take ours, and sometimes they dance if we can call it that. If we try to get closer, they retreat. If we try to send drones inside the caves, they never return. It’s great; no one has killed anyone. But it’s scarcely communication.

“There’s gonna be a comms outage in a minute, lasting for about fifteen. One of our sats stopped working. Just stay put and don’t let her do anything crazy, okay? A transport is coming to get you later.”

“Roger.” Even as I say that, I hear static in the background.

We are, for all practical purposes, alone.

With all the open land around us.

“What was this educated guess you’ve taken?” I strive to keep my voice calm, even as I feel beads of sweat forming on my forehead, too quickly to be absorbed by my soaked headband.

“Its dance pattern. It kept changing. There was another pattern to that change. One that yielded predictions. I relied on the statistically most likely one. It has elicited a reaction. However, meaning remains unclear.”

“So that’s it?” I shake my head. Immediately, I realize that I shouldn’t have done that. The dizziness returns. I focus my gaze on the suited figure. Her visor is clear. I can see her face, younger than mine, similar in its semi-darker skin tone. Her head seems cleanly shaven under her absorbent cap. I wonder if she’s got any visible augmentations underneath it. “How big was this statistical likelihood? What was the tree of possibilities diverging from this decision? How have you weighed the risks and benefits?”

Damn, damn, damn! I should remain calm. Instead, I fall back to my feelings about Gaia and what happened there.

Abigail opens her mouth to speak, or rather the thing inside her head makes her do so, but I’m not done. It’s probably the stress and the meds talking. It’s madness, but at that moment, all my control simply gives way.

“Just like you and your beloved ship AI weighed the risks on Gaia! Just like you doomed us all.”

Abigail’s face doesn’t betray any surprise. That only angers me further.

“Can you imagine my possibilities? I’ll tell you! We’re doing everything to keep the algae and meat production going, but they grow so poorly on the processed regolith! We’re slowly starving day by day. And yet we’re doing everything we can to starve more, because we need more people to get this whole fucking thing going. And with the artiwomb tech irreparable, it means getting pregnant.” I exhale. “That’s the single fucking possibility my life converges to, unless I want to keep surviving on meager reduced rations all my life.”

That would still have been preferable to the alternative. I’d have little, but I wouldn’t actually starve. But to face the ostracism of every single person I’ve known and will know throughout my life, with no possibility of escape other than death—I was too much of a coward to face that. I had seen it. This is exactly what we have been working so hard to avoid. A problem we have known about. Absolutely no one wanted to make women into walking baby factories; no one wanted to limit choices and impose ultimatums. And yet, with the failure of our artiwombs, that was exactly what has happened. Everyone has acknowledged it. Everyone was thinking about those horrible fictional scenarios from centuries ago and how we’ve seemingly moved past them. Everyone was feeling sorry.

And yet I would still need to bear a child, or several, or become a pariah.

My dizziness is subsiding. Either the meds are finally working properly, or I needed to get this out really badly. I couldn’t talk about this with anyone back home. Everyone had a role. Everyone had a purpose to fulfill. Some things were simply not discussed. So what if the thought of being pregnant and giving birth filled me with greater sickness than my agoraphobia? I had a duty.

Abigail didn’t speak a word. She just regarded me calmly, not thrown at all by my foolish tantrum. Fuck. Here we were, after just having made another step towards understanding a possibly intelligent alien species. Something to far surpass any one of us. And I have just vented about my sorry life.

“That’s probably something you don’t have to worry about,” I said wryly.

“It’s not. And I’m sorry that you are going through this.”

I am completely, utterly taken aback. “You—you can speak? I mean, speak normally?”

“When I choose to.”

“But why … why haven’t you …” But I realize already as I’m speaking. I have been nothing but apprehensive of her. Even to the point of calling her a linkhead openly. No wonder she’s avoided talking to me. Perhaps it felt safer to play the puppet.

Still no expression on that face of hers. I wonder how much of it is the effect of having an AI in her head, and how much a learned behavior from having to interact with stupid fucks like me.

“I’m s-sorry,” I stammer. “I … ah … had some misconceptions …”

“I understand. Truth be told, not all Joined can speak normally, as you call it. But most of us do and mostly use speech in everyday conversations. We are human. We are just not only human.”

At that moment, the ice beneath my feet rumbles and shakes, and I almost succumb to panic. Oh gods, another icequake!

I feel the squeeze of another suited hand on my palm. Abigail is there. “Are you all right?”

Before I can muster a response, I hear a different crackle of static, and my team-comms channel takes over. “We’re back, Stella! Are you reading us?”

“Roger,” I say, still staring at the newfound mystery next to me.

“We’re coming to get you and that linkhead. She and her bosses have questions to answer.”

This time, I turn off the subroutine that automatically transmits my and Abigail’s communication to the rest of my team. They’ll ask later, but I hope to file it under a technical failure or perhaps an accident on my part.

Abigail and I stand alone on the same patch of ice as before. The original landing place; the strange meeting point.

“We can talk freely now,” I say. “So if you’ve got any more aces up your sleeve like the last time, feel free to mention them. I won’t stop you, you know.”

“No questions about the value of the statistical likelihood?”

Her voice is serious and her face still betrays nothing, but I decide to take an educated guess. “So you have a sense of humor!”

“Indeed I do! But also feel free to ask me about statistical likelihoods.”

I start laughing; I can’t help myself. It has been ages since I last laughed. Gods, how I’ve missed it!

To my consternation, Abigail joins in.

When the laughter subsides, we spend a moment in silence, regarding each other and the strange place we have found ourselves in, and then she speaks: “Truth be told, it was mostly intuition last time. I just didn’t want to look silly. Talking about statistical likelihoods makes all of it sound far more rigorous.”

“Intuition?” I’m part horrified, part curious.

“Yes. Of course, intuition is merely analyses running in the background, processed unconsciously. The problem is that it’s not rigorous. Out-of-context heuristics, preconceptions, mistakenly filed data, can all enter into it and we wouldn’t see it. Nor do we have neat analytical outputs. Everything contributed by my AI cores as well as my brain is a black box, messy, but … I felt sure enough to go with it.”

She sounds nothing like I imagined a linkhead—gods, I need to stop using that term—a Joined would sound.

“Your bosses must have had some aces up their sleeves, too,” I say finally. “I was half-certain I would never see you here again. Much less in two days’ time. You know, I think I was almost pulled from the project. They were really angry I didn’t stop you last time. But I think they were also secretly happy that we finally made some small step forward. So … anything to watch out for this time?”

“First, we’ll see what they do.”

“Yeah. If they choose to appear at all.”

No ant-like form is making its way to us so far. Nor did any appear yesterday. Perhaps that’s part of why they sent Abigail and me again today. Hoping for more progress? But how the hell could the aliens tell us apart in identical space suits?

We strike up a conversation about the ants. How little we know and how much we think and imagine. How peculiar it is that only one of them appears each time. Could it be the same individual over and over? We’ve tried to determine that through comparing detailed images, but we can’t be certain; what if they are all really, really uniform in appearance?

And the newest artifact we’ve received. Our side got it, and the rest of my team was cheering the win over the linkheads. I contemplate asking Abigail about it, but opt not to at this time. Instead, I throw around some theories about the ants’ biology and evolution. After all, no one had expected complex life on this icy world.

“Yes, it is a mystery. I’m excited about taking part of solving it. Although I’m not a biologist. I’m most of all an artist.”

“A what?”

“Someone who makes—”

“Hold on, I know what it means,” I interrupt her. “It’s just strange to hear someone claim to be an artist out here. I thought that was just a hobby. Something to fill your spare time, if you’ve got any and if it doesn’t consume common resources.”

“Apart from a few specialists, we all do our part in maintaining the settlement. But we don’t necessarily have to think of that as central to our lives. Some of us even decide not to be present for those tasks. Mentally, I mean. They retreat elsewhere, do science, art, anything.”

“And you?”

“I like to stay grounded. I’m always there when I’m doing repairs, agriculture, any of those things. I like to be really present in my body to notice things. My core module thrives on it.”

I feel like I’m stepping onto very thin ice—though that metaphor doesn’t really work on this world. “Your core module? You mean the AI in your head?”

“The central part of it. It’s a little like different regions of the brain, where lots of the stuff eventually gets integrated in the prefrontal cortex. Core modules are, very distantly, like that.” For the first time, she looks at me quizzically. I can see the surprise and curiosity in her eyes. “You really don’t know anything about us, do you?”

“Well, I …” Of course it’s all there in the data libraries, if I wanted to peruse it. But what would be the point? This is something we vowed never to do to ourselves.

“You could call my core an artist module,” Abigail continues. “It integrates data from all aspects of life and creates new patterns. New meaning, you could say. Before this project, I was mostly working on paintings and sculptures for interior areas of our settlement, although I tried a few projects in vacuum as well. I also tried unconscious art.” She must notice my confusion, since she adds: “I can let my AIsistant induce sleep and control my body. I’m not aware of what I’m doing, but the AI in sync with my unconscious brain processes produces ideas that my AI-led body acts upon.”

The thought of having an AI puppet my body is chilling. But if anything could sound truly alien, it’s being an artist. I mean, we all knew art was an important part of human life. But we also knew that we had to survive, and so we pushed all those important but non-vital matters aside for the time being. The thought of having someone decorate—how preposterous!

“You must be doing so much better than we are.” I can’t prevent bitterness from seeping into my voice. Filling it, in fact.

“Oh, we are likely not,” Abigail assures me. “Our population is declining and we too suffer ration problems. But I suppose the difference is that we have different utility functions, so to speak.”

“Utility functions. Now you really sound like we imagine the Joined to be.”

“I was … trying to be polite. I do tend to revert to formality and terminology when I do that. I think you—your people, that is—are misguided. But I can be wrong. We are taking a greater bet. Pursuing unnecessary science and even more unnecessary art, trying not to push reproductive choices on people, and risking that we won’t make it. Perhaps the Galaxy is littered with the remains of such fools, and only hardy pragmatists survive and one day perhaps will begin to make art again. Old Earth history is full of such examples.” Abigail pauses. “But I don’t want to keep you from your task.”

“My—oh gods!”

Although my suit’s instruments have kept recording outside data, I have completely failed to notice the ant’s approach. I glance at Abigail, and even through her visor I see her eyes slightly unfocus. Her mouth moves silently, and I wonder what the AI-brain concert in her head sounds like now.

The ants could have something akin to that for all we know. They could even be biotech robots. We would have no idea so far. Would they have evolved on this world, where the surface seems devoid of life? Could a subsurface biosphere produce enough biomass to support such large creatures? And if they were made—by whom, then?

These and other questions often keep me up at night, but there is a strange hollowness to it. There should be joy to curiosity, pure curiosity, but I cannot find it. Everything is tainted by my prospects, all of our prospects.

The ant stops. It is carrying something in its mandibles. Another polished slab, all covered with finely carved lines and dots.

My breath catches. The pattern almost looks like a star map. Could that be …?

With no warning, Abigail starts … singing. I realize I’m not hearing it just from our radio link. She’s transmitting it outside, from a speaker. The thin atmosphere is not great for conducting sound, but it still carries—and the ant seems to perceive it. It alters its posture, raising its front pair of legs. Listening organs? Like in crickets?

Anything to watch out for, I asked her. Has she been sincere with me? Or had she already determined to try this? How does it work? We use narrowly specialized AI as well as human-led analyses to get through all the data we gather, trying to decode the patterns in the dance and on the previous offering, trying to learn about the ants without having to enter their tunnels; and here she is, just making this up on the go?

I glance at her face to find out, and find her eyes glassy, like she’s not there. Is she doing what she’s described to me moments ago? Giving an AI free rein over her body?

Before the ant leaves, when she finishes her wordless song, it carves an image in the ice with its forelegs. No idea what it means.

I see Abigail’s eyes focus again. “Have you …?” I begin.

“No. It just came to me, and I had to space out and let it happen. It’s always running in the background, a part of me but not always quite conscious …. It’s not unlike when regular, non-Joined people who are highly trained in some task just leave all conscious thought aside and run on procedural memory. But it must have been a shock to witness. I’m sorry.”

No, I am, I think. I’m sorry that I can’t do the same.

I still have so many questions.

There is an endless well of them regarding the ants, and then an equally bottomless one regarding Abigail and the Joined in general. During our next work sessions together, I inquire about learning—“Different data can be loaded to our modules. But it’s another way to easily access it and put it in context. Uploading a geology textbook doesn’t make you an expert—but it makes it far easier to become one with training,”—her artmaking—“No, it’s not just my core module. It’s all my non-human parts as well as the human ones working in sync. My brain could operate on its own if anything happened to the modules. And vice versa. But it’s not as efficient,”—the nature of her symbiotic AI—“It’s descended from the AIsistants people used on Earth and then on Gaia. No mystery to it. Just cores of connected specialized AIs to give them greater generative and predictive power. They don’t think the same as we do, but we can use them. Figuring out how to make those connections—that in itself is science, engineering and art in one. My modules are hyperconnected, allowing for more leaps of intuition, but it has drawbacks ...”—and more. Eventually we veer toward our responses to the landscape around us. Abigail commends my affinity with Escher and admits being partial to that style as well. She even promises to show me some of her pieces.

And she tries to help me through my agoraphobia. Apparently the Joined suffer from it too, like most of us, but their AIs help them to beat it. I don’t have that option, but she guides me through breathing exercises. They are not so different from the ones we practice, but perhaps it’s her presence that helps. Even as the ice crumbles and we feel the distant roar of an iceslide through the thick soles of our boots, I manage to stay in control.

While we wait for another of our strange encounters, I scramble up the courage to ask: “What do you think of our future?”

“What do you mean? That is such a broadly phrased question …”

I look at Abigail. “I think you are our future. And it terrifies me. Or, it used to. It has chilled me to the bone, the thought that you will surely prevail, while we die miserably in the long run.” I give a sad smile. “It’s like agriculture, isn’t? It might be a step down for the individual, but in the end the society can grow beyond what was possible before. And before you blink, the agriculturalists come to their happier and healthier free-roaming cousins and slaughter them, because they are unmatched in numbers. Or they just push them further and further out to the periphery, where conditions are poor and resources scarce, and everyone is either absorbed by the newly forming empire, or dies off. I used to think that you might be worse off as individuals, but that as a whole, you seem to have an advantage over the rest of us.”

“And now?” Abigail inquires gently.

“Now? Now I wish I could join you.” No more tiptoeing around it. I realize I have been envious of Abigail ever since we were paired up for the mission. Scared of her, yes, that too, but envious of what she could do so seemingly effortlessly and I couldn’t.

“You can.”

“That’s the hardest part.”

I break eye contact and instead search the vast landscape for an approaching ant.

Of course I have been thinking about it. From the moment Abigail became a person to me, I have wondered if I’ve found an escape route for myself. The question is, would I still be myself?

On the other hand, would I remain myself—someone I would recognize as “myself” if my current self could see that person in a few decades’ time—if I stayed?

It beckons us to follow.

I’m jumping to conclusions, projecting, imagining—but every part of my body is telling me that the ant wants us to follow it.

It’s been ten more encounters, out of which three were with us. I don’t know how, but the ants seem to recognize us. Abigail, in her impromptu performances, seems to have a knack at eliciting reactions from them. I keep wondering how much it’s her and how much it’s the AI embedded in her head; but isn’t it as meaningless as asking whether my lateral prefrontal cortex or my inferior temporal gyrus contributed more to my artistic attempts? It’s connected. I could have a brain injury and lose the function of a region or two, and my mind would change, but it wouldn’t be a simple subtraction. I suspect it’s the same for Abigail: her AI cannot think per se, but it can rapidly analyze vast swaths of data and make different connections, predictions and generated imagery than a human would. Working in synchrony with her brain, it gains something an AI alone never could achieve: emotion. Ever since I began to scour the ship and habitat databases for art, stories and music, I found older purely AI-generated works flat; sometimes perfect in their execution, even original, but failing to inspire. In contrast, the human-AI combination was hard to beat, I had to admit.

Now the ant moves its front legs, carves a pattern in the ice with their tips, turns and skitters a few steps away. Then turns and waits … expectantly? I’m not sure what to make of it. What does Abigail, with her chimeric nature?

“Do we go?” Her voice rings in my ears. “We might never get a chance at this again. Or not for a long time.”

We should wait for instructions, for careful data analysis, not rely on something as unpredictable and unreproducible as fucking intuition.

But if this is my last task before I must choose between ostracism and facing a life change that terrifies me, let no one take this away from me.

“Go,” I say.

I keep my team channel shut down and ignore the emergency hails. I keep collecting data; they’ll have a cornucopia of it once I’m done. But this moment is mine.

Strangely elated, I follow the ant, Abigail by my side. My agoraphobia is there, pounding somewhere in the back of my skull, but I barely notice it. Even when the ice shakes, I stay focused.

“Seismics are not looking good. We might need to head back,” Abigail suddenly says.

“What? You said yourself that this might be our only chance ...”

“I’m just informing you. Do we continue?”

“We must.” I realize I have never been more certain of anything in my life. Is this intuition?

We pass towering rocks, cross perilous narrow ravines, and rely on our radars as to where to step; the six-legged alien has an advantage over us. At times, it stays and waits until we catch up. If that isn’t an invite, I’m not sure what is.

We are heading to the nearest tunnel entrance, from where they always emerge to meet with us. It’s a tunnel in rock-hard ice, as wide as I am tall, with the ceiling a little higher. I know it connects to a larger old lava tube later on; that much we know from radar, but nothing more. When we step inside, I can soon spot signs of workmanship. It’s an ice hallway, its walls carefully smoothed.

“Do you see?” Abigail whispers, awe in her voice.

I can see it much later than she, not having a speedway from extra senses into my brain and help in analyzing that input. But there is no mistaking the slightly glowing carvings in the wall as we go deeper into the slightly descending tunnel. The recordings we’ll bring; and we’re not yet even there yet, wherever there is. So far we haven‘t seen any other ants.

Suddenly, the one in front of us halts and moves its front legs frantically. No one has ever seen one do anything like this. “What does—” I say before the world grumbles and roars.

I can no longer see the ant. I only glimpse the cracks in the walls and hear a strange wail. Later, I learn it’s a sound ice makes. It can sound almost human …. But when I lose my foothold and immediately the ceiling comes down on us, I’m not thinking about sounds. How funny. It was so comfortable in here, so much like a ship or habitat corridor …

The ice crashes down.

I don’t know how long I have been out when I wake to the flickering of red lights and beeping of emergency notifications. The suit says it’s been barely two minutes, but it feels like an eternity. My whole body aches, and despite the reinforced areas of my suit I feel an almost suffocating pressure.

I’m not … going to die here?

I cannot move. Knowing myself for the lousy astronaut I am, I should be panicking. But the suit has just pumped me full of meds to soothe pain and calm me down. Okay, let’s go through the notifications. Damage to the primary oxygen tank …. Air reserve to last another hour …

It took at least thirty minutes to walk here.

I am going to die.

Strangely calm, I contemplate the ant. Has it reached somewhere safe, perhaps the lava tube? Had it wanted to lead us into danger? But no; it could have easily had disposed of us outside. Maybe it thought it was leading us to safety instead, but we were too slow, or it was just as surprised by the quake as we were …

Except we weren’t. Abigail informed me of the danger …

And I still led her in here to die. Now she is likely dying too, paying the price for my stupidity, for me thinking I can somehow intuit that we must go.

Part of the pressure eases and a bright light shines onto my visor. I can’t see for a second, then I focus on the darkened visor of Abigail’s suit. “Try to free your arms.”

I do. My right arm is hurting and I can’t fully move it, but my left is functional. Abigail is standing in an adjacent, uncollapsed section of the tunnel, her emergency shovel held in both hands. She helps me free myself. Only now do I notice that her suit is battered too, fixed with emergency foam in places. “How are you?”

A pause. An unusually flat voice says: “This is not Abigail as you have known her. Abigail is injured and suffering from a life-threatening brain hemorrhage in her prefrontal cortex. In accordance with emergency protocols, I can still control the body through intact neural and synth-neural connections.”

I falter for a second. I’m speaking just to the AI?

“No time to lose. Come with me.”

We scramble up the remains of the tunnel. Not-Abigail has to stop a few times to move ice boulders so that we can squeeze through. Her strength seems unaffected despite her injuries.

Finally we reach the outside. I check my oxygen. About thirty-five minutes to go. But I’m injured and weakened, however my suit med kit tries to help me.

I shouldn’t waste my breath on talking, but I must ask: “How—how are you doing this?”

“I have told you. You should save your oxygen. I see your tank is damaged.”

“But you move … and speak …” Almost like her.

The long-range antennas are shot in both suits. We can talk to each other, but no one else. No option but go toward the patch. I look ahead and feel dizzy. I can’t say where we came from, and can’t access the map. Human eyes. Useless here.

Not-Abigail remains silent, supporting me when I falter and leading me toward the landing site far faster than I could go alone, especially as disoriented as I am. But I notice the irregularities in her gait and how awkwardly her left arm dangles now that she’s no longer holding the shovel.

I break free. “Don’t help me! She’s got injuries you might be aggravating!”

“Her injuries are likely to kill her in any case. You have a good chance of survival if aided.”

“No!” I shout despite a low oxygen warning that starts blaring on my HUD. “It’s her! You’re her! You can’t … just can’t sacrifice her like this …”

“Then let us put it in other words. You are her friend, and she would have wanted you to survive.”

Even horrified, I still follow and let her (it?) guide me across ravines in the ice and between sharp rocky spikes. I’m too dazed to follow my radar, and my suit’s visor is flashing new emergency notifications.

“The landing patch is not too far away.” Her voice sounds feeble now. “If you must continue without me, you … must. No stopping.”

My breath catches. It sounds just like her now. I realize how trivial it is to mimic another person’s speech patterns, but still …. I’m talking to a parrot, but she is in there …

I move to lead her for a change.

“No.”

The no is resolute. Suddenly, her darkened visor clears, and my breath catches as I see her ashen face and empty eyes.

“Go.”

I do. I’m not looking back, not in this perilous landscape that has always terrified the hell out of me, not when I need all of my focus to avoid falling down a new crack in the ice. I think I can see the landing patch now.

WARNING: OXYGEN LEVEL CRITICAL.

It all comes down to utility functions.

Presented with identical data, predictions and resources, two people might make two radically different decisions based on what traits and outcomes they value. There can often be false dichotomies. But we are bound by them regardless.

And so are artificial intelligences, because we made them so. We’d feared the unlimited growth of black boxes so much that we strapped utility functions onto them. An afterthought, really, but it makes all the difference.

People had wanted Gaia not only to succeed, but to do so in a way that maintained the values of the people mounting and boarding the mission. The mainframe AI wasn’t just a glorified calculator; it had values, too. And when the engines misfired, it made a choice.

A purely numbers- and risk-driven analysis would have killed three dozen people to ensure a safer journey for hundreds. A thing with no conscience would be making that decision; the survivors need not feel overwhelming guilt.

But the mission objectives were not just to get to the destination; they were to get there as a cohesive society, where one could rely upon another. Condemning people to death was not a part of that.

There began the divide, with many blaming the later failures, such as the loss of artiwombs and repair capacity, on that kind decision and more to come, by the ship and Joined alike. Kind, but all seen as detrimental to survival. What was meant to unify did in fact divide.

I’m thinking about this as I find myself on a Joined transport, being stripped of my suit and taken care of by the transport’s medical unit. I’m barely aware of the procedures. All I can think about is the choice I’ll soon have to make.

Return home, to the world I’ve known all my life, to its familiar certainty?

Or request asylum and eventually become Joined?

I can’t stop thinking about the horror of dead Abigail walking me to my rescue. The simultaneous ruthlessness and kindness of the surviving AI puppeting the body. Is it dead now, along with her? I don’t think it can be transplanted; the connections are too dependent on her brain. But some data could be scraped, isolated memories and patterns extracted. I hope something survives beyond her. I hope to see her art.

Her art. I remember something, more like a dream than a memory: I’m lying on the landing patch, suddenly able to breathe again, and a suited figure moves around me. Her movements are strained, slow, but determined.

I can breathe again. Oh gods. Her oxygen …

The figure, missing its primary tank and the other clearly damaged, keeps moving. Drawing in the ice. The human Abigail is gone; perhaps she was really gone from the moment the ice ceiling crashed, but the AI didn’t want me to panic.

It is continuing the work. Leaving a message? Trying to explain what happened?

I’m drifting in and out. As I feel the transport scooping me up, I glimpse a falling figure … and, far between the jagged rocks, two ant-like shapes moving toward the site. Two. Or am I just imagining things?

Now, as I am on the transport and heavily sedated, my mind wanders. How unique was Abigail’s artistic approach? How reproducible with another AI? Would they talk to anyone else but her?

I’ll Join, I think. I’ll continue the work. At least, I will try.

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