Reader Favorite Wednesday: A Body In Motion

Editor’s note(s): Because we’ve grown so much in the past year, we asked you, our readers, to let us know what your early favorite stories were, so we could share them with everyone during the months of November and December (and maybe a little beyond). We’re so pleased to share our third Readers Favorite Wednesday story: Will Alexander’s “A Body In Motion” — now free to read — from May 2022. ~ Fran & Julian, November 30, 2022. (We’ll include our original editors’ note with each story as well.)

Will Alexander’s “A Body in Motion” gives us a full-on SF space movie in miniature. It has everything: thrills, chills, laughs, mysteries, and an utterly charming Baby AI. I want to read more in this world!

~ Julian Yap, May 8, 2022

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A Body in Motion

Agatha Panza von Sparkles, my babysitting responsibility aboard the Sonora, settled into the pilot seat for the very first time.

“Steady,” I said.

“I know.” Agatha’s mechanical fingers settled over the controls with deliberate care.

“Stay focused,” I said.

“I know,” she said, and then became immediately distracted. “There’s a debris field up ahead. Should we investigate? Look for survivors?”

I pulled up my own display. “Whatever happened over there doesn’t look survivable.”

“Can I go see?” Agatha asked.

I knew what she was asking but pretended not to know. “You’re the one flying. Bring us closer.”

She shook her head with precision—forty-five degrees to the right, forty-five to the left, and then back to center. “No, I mean really see.”

“You want to dive into the sensory data stream?”

“Yes,” she said.

“No.”

“Just a peek?” she pleaded.

“No.”

“I promise to come right back!”

“Absolutely not, Agatha Panza von Sparkles.” Full names have power.

She tilted her head forty-five degrees downward, which meant sulking. “Fine, Captain Mom.”

That was new.

Juvenile AI need to be embodied. They require the anchored limitation of one robotic chassis until after they mature. Otherwise, a baby bot will split their attention by splitting themselves into smaller and smaller fragments—one for every shiny thing that they notice and decide to chase. Those separate pieces will drown in the data stream, unable to reassemble themselves. (This also makes an irreparable mess of whatever code they dive into.)

My side gig for seven years has been babysitting baby bots. Once they grow enough self-cohesion, the kids can leave the nest of my ship and go pilot one of their own. Sometimes they keep in touch. Sometimes not. Sometimes gendered identities emerge. Sometimes not. Agatha announced her full name within the first week of our first run between Phoebe and Luna.

This was our third run. She slowed us down to examine the puzzle pieces of debris that littered our usual route.

“It used to be a ship,” Agatha said. She had stopped sulking, which was nice. This kid didn’t hold a grudge. Now she seemed content to focus on the visual display, even though plugging directly into shipboard systems would have been so much faster. (That was the problem. Data streams have rushing currents and deadly undertow. Agatha wasn’t a strong-enough swimmer yet.) “It was a little ship. Smaller than ours. Just enough for a crew of one.”

The little ship had been smashed into itty-bitty bits. That only ever happened on purpose. Catastrophic accidents might leave gaping holes, but the rest of the structure remains more or less intact. No part of this ex-ship was still intact.

“We need to go,” I said. “We need to be on our way and already forgetting that we ever saw any of this.”

Agatha ignored me. Maybe she was still sulking after all, or maybe the display had claimed her full attention. “There’s a body.”

Now we couldn’t leave.

I managed not to curse in front of the kid. “Okay. Show me.”

She showed me. The suit floated a fair distance away from the debris field, which meant that the single crew member had abandoned ship before the pulverizing happened.

“Do you think they’re still alive?” Agatha asked.

“No,” I said. “Check the temperature inside that suit.”

“Three kelvins,” Agatha said. “That’s very cold.” She sounded sad.

“Freezing isn’t a bad way to die,” I said. “Scoot over and let me drive.”

She didn’t protest. I settled into my chair and shifted course, matching the body’s path away from the event that got them killed.

Agatha noticed. “Are we going to pick up the dead person?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Even though it’s too late to help?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why? Because they were probably a courier, just like us?”

That was a very strong argument for not picking them up. “I’m impressed you put that together.”

“You shouldn’t be.” She sounded annoyed, like I’d just set off her condescension alarm. That was new. “Most single-crewed craft are piloted by couriers. It’s not impressive that I noticed. Are we going to deliver their message, whatever it is, now that they’re too dead to do it themselves?”

“Definitely not,” I said. “We are going to send that body home—if we can figure out where home is.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s terrible to lose someone at sea. You never find out if the lost sailor decided to leave you behind or if they died while trying to come back to you.”

Agatha’s eyes made little whirring noises as she focused on my face. “Did you lose someone that way?”

A week ago she wouldn’t have been able to put that together. I was proud of her but didn’t say so. “Yes. I did. One of my moms flew away and never came back. The one who carried me.”

“Because you’re mammals.”

“That’s right,” I said. “We’re mammals.”

The only nonmammalian form of biological life that Agatha had met so far was a smuggled pet iguana. She’d named him Ferdinand. We kept him fed, delivered him on time, and filed no complaints about improper transport.

“Why did your mother fly away?”

“She was a courier.”

“Like us?”

“Like us. One of the best.”

“I want to be one of the best,” Agatha said.

“I don’t,” I told her. “Excellence is dangerous. The best couriers get chased down, intercepted, bribed, and/or blown up whenever powerful people want their messages redirected, delayed, or destroyed unread—which is pretty much all of the time. Better to stick with third-class deliveries.”

“Do you think that this courier got chased down and blown up?” Agatha asked.

I concentrated on nudging our guest into the airlock and didn’t answer right away. “Yes. Probably. Which is why we’re going to remain actively disinterested in whatever message they carry.”

Agatha didn’t understand disinterest—curiosity is a near-universal juvenile trait—so I let her take charge of one mystery in order to distract her from any of the others. “Go examine the body. Try to figure out who it used to be and which place they called home.”

She bounced off every wall on her way to the airlock.

I followed and hovered on the other side of the inner hatch. It’s hard not to hover when kids play in airlocks, even when those kids don’t need to breathe. “Check the tags once you get the helmet off.”

“I know,” she said. “Let me concentrate.” The helmet clasps took awhile. Agatha was still building up her fine motor control. “No decompression. The eyes and tongue didn’t pop inside the helmet, which would have been messy. Freezing is not a bad way to die, right?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Check the tags?”

“I know,” she said. I could hear the cold metal necklace clink as she tucked it free. “Name: Michael de Cuneo. Gendered male. Twenty-seven standard orbits old. Courier, first class.”

Of course he was. “What about home? Next of kin? Guild number?”

“None given,” Agatha said. “The only thing stamped on the second tag is a circle surrounded by radiating lines.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. That changes things.”

“What is it?”

“His last wish. A picture of the sun.”

* * *

I spent the next two hours answering insatiably curious questions about sun cults and funeral customs.

“People want to be thrown into the sun?”

“Yes. Lots of them do.”

“Why?”

“They think of it as going home.”

Agatha shook her head several times, but only slightly, with just a five-degree shift to either side. That meant she was laughing. “Nobody is from the sun. Nothing was born, hatched, or coded on the sun. It’s too hot.”

“True,” I said. “It’s still where we began, though. The sun was our only source of heat, light, and life when people were growing up earthbound—before we could make heat, light, or life work elsewhere. We only exist because the sun was here first. We can only survive for as long as the sun lasts.”

“Which is how long?”

“Seven billion years. Maybe eight.”

“I hope it’s eight.”

“Me too.”

“What happens after that?”

“The sun will swell up, swallow all the planets, and then burn out.”

Agatha took seven seconds to process the death of the solar system. “So all of our elements are going to end up in there anyway.”

“Yes,” I said. “Eventually. Meanwhile, everybody who opts for solar cremation gets to be part of what gives light and life to everything else.”

“Is that what you want?” she asked. “After you die?”

“No,” I said. “Waste of fuel to get there. Turn me into fertilizer for Martian bubble-gardens instead. I’d rather be tiny pieces of plants drinking sunlight than plasma burning up to make the stuff.”

I didn’t ask what Agatha would want done with her current chassis if she should ever cease to inhabit it—mostly because it wasn’t her decision to make. The manufacturer would reassert ownership over her component parts in the event of a return to factory default settings.

Agatha thoughtfully focused and unfocused her big glass eyes. “Michael de Cuneo wanted to burn.”

“That’s what his tags tell us,” I said. “No rush, though. We’ll keep him tucked away in the airlock until after we make our own delivery. Then we’ll throw him into the sun.”

* * *

Phoebe called and gave us several reasons to rush.

(I mean both the moon and the person. Phoebe is my boss. She lives on Phoebe Station.)

“Hey there, Sonora,” said Phoebe of Phoebe. “You automatically logged a brief delay, so now I’m checking in. Send me a thumbs-up to confirm that all essential systems are still chugging on that duct-taped raft, will you?”

I paused the message to stare at Phoebe’s frozen face.

“What’s wrong?” Agatha asked.

“Boss knows better than to insult my ship. She also knows better than to fuss over a brief delay.” I waved at the message to continue.

“You’ve probably seen the news from Luna already. Docking will be a mess, so you might want to subcontract the actual delivery rather than trying to land. Hurry back after that. I’ve got first-class work waiting for you. Phoebe out.”

I played the whole message again.

“Weird,” Agatha said after the second time.

“How so?” I asked. “Walk me through it.”

“Phoebe knows that you never check the news feeds, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Why fret about things I can’t fix?”

“She also knows that we get paid on delivery, so the stuff about subcontracting makes no sense.”

“True,” I said. “What else does the boss know?”

Agatha turned to focus her huge glass eyes on my face. “She knows that you only accept third-class work. Because you don’t want to be the best. Even though you could be the best, if you wanted. Also, first-class assignments won’t just sit around until we get back. People who pay for top-tier deliveries hate waiting.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“So why would Boss Phoebe say any of those things?” Agatha asked.

“To warn us. Someone must have noticed a courier ship poke around a particular debris field. That same someone probably went to the guild, which led them to Phoebe. She must not have liked the sorts of questions they asked.”

Agatha titled her head sixty degrees downward. “What should we do now?”

“What do you think?” If Agatha Panza von Sparkles was going to grow up to be a first-class courier, then she would need to learn how to navigate this kind of mess. “Should we send Phoebe a status report, like she told us to?”

Agatha looked up. “No. She told us not to. It would make us easier to track.”

“That’s right. So what should we do instead?”

“Check the news.”

* * *

The news was bad.

A whole swath of lunar docks and shipyards had collapsed. Thousands of casualties. The largest fleet of funeral barges ever launched was already on its way from the moon to the sun.

I expected questions from Agatha, but she focused on decisions instead.

“We can’t go to Luna,” she said.

“Definitely not,” I agreed.

“We shouldn’t go anywhere near Luna,” she went on. “Phoebe mentioned our destination in the message, and she knew that whoever killed Michael de Cuneo would overhear, so that was another warning.”

“Agreed,” I said. (There’s no such thing as a truly encrypted transmission. If you want to pass a secret note across the solar system, hire a decent courier.) “What should we do now?”

“Hide,” Agatha said. “Maybe here?” She tapped the news footage of funeral barges. “We do have a passenger to deliver.”

I nodded. “Good.”

“You think it’s a good decision?”

“Yes. I also think it’s good that you made it. Now strap in. We’re going to get a lot heavier before we catch up with the dead.”

“Heaviness bothers you more than me.” She struggled with the harness buckles. I didn’t offer to help or urge her to hurry, even though kill-the-messenger types were definitely searching for us at that very moment. She needed to learn how to do it herself.

* * *

After several hours of internal-organ-squishing acceleration, we joined the fleet of flying hearses. Some were asteroids carved into ornate mausoleums. Others had been made to look like Viking longships, which struck me as the tackiest possible option. Most were the size and shape of simple coffins. Lots of those coffin-size craft were transparent, displaying occupants lucky enough to have died in one piece (or else reassembled by gifted embalmers).

We docked with one of the larger mausoleums and tried to look like we were supposed to be there. It felt awkward. All funerals are awkward.

I climbed into a suit and then shut down everything except the most essential systems. No one else in this fleet needed life support. We needed to blend in.

“What now?” Agatha whispered.

“Now we’re going to find and read that first-class message.”

“But you said before that we shouldn’t.”

“Changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Because it might tell us something useful about the people who killed our guest.”

“People who probably want to kill us now.”

“Right.”

Agatha moved all of her fingers at once. That was new. I wasn’t sure what it meant. Frustration? Fidgeting?

“We were going to throw him into the sun,” she said. “It’s what he wanted. It also would have destroyed his message unread, which is what his killers wanted. They could have gotten everything that they tried to accomplish, including the destruction of evidence, if they’d just left us alone instead of trying to track us through Boss Phoebe—but we can’t talk to them and tell them that, because they’d never believe us. So now we’re going to read the message, which is exactly what none of us wanted to happen.”

I took her hands. They kept fidgeting. Even through pressurized suit gloves I could feel metal joints flex beneath the rubber of her skin. “Are you angry?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m not sure. Are you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Right now I’m even angrier at our guest than the people who killed him.”

“Because we inherited his trouble?”

“No. I’m mad at that stupid first-class courier for a much stupider reason. He didn’t list his next of kin, so either he didn’t have any or he didn’t care enough to let them know what happened to him.”

Agatha refocused her eyes. “Maybe he was trying to protect his kin by leaving them unlisted.”

I didn’t like that possibility any better.

We climbed into the airlock and sealed the inner door behind us to keep small frozen pieces of Michael de Cuneo from floating around my ship.

Agatha removed the corpse’s helmet again. She was quicker with the clasps this time.

“Pass me the medkit,” I told her.

She glanced at me sideways. “I’m pretty sure that he’s beyond our help.”

I should have let myself laugh. “We still need to scan his genes, though.”

“Why?”

“Because first-class couriers store messages in their own code. Blueprints for growth and maturity get re-sequenced to carry new data. This guy was a full adult, so theoretically he didn’t need the old instruction manual that told him how to build a grown-up body.”

The medkit took several minutes to read those rewritten genes.

Agatha flexed her fingers while we waited.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said.

“Of course I’m right,” I said. “About what?”

“About sticking with third-class work,” she said. “I don’t want any of my code erased to make room for someone else’s mail. What do you think this message will say?”

I shrugged, which she probably couldn’t see through my suit. “Could be practically anything. A treaty agreement from the shipwrights’ guild. A corporate patent that some other company wants to squelch. A report about whatever just went wrong on Luna and whose fault that was. If someone is already responsible for getting thousands of people killed, then they might not care about killing a few more to keep it secret.”

The medkit chimed. Its tiny green-tinted display showed the entirety of Michael de Cuneo’s message: This file is intentionally blank.

I tried not to laugh, and failed, which gave me a hiccupping fit.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Agatha protested.

“He was a decoy,” I said between hiccups. “Disposable. Meant to be noticed while some other courier snuck away.”

“No, I mean the actual message,” she said. “It claims to be blank, but it isn’t. The statement of blankness negates itself. Paradox. Cannot compute. Bzzzzzzzzzzzt.”

She lowered chin to chest.

“You are hilarious,” I said.

“You are correct,” she answered.

Urgent lights flashed in my helmet display. Proximity alarms panicked. The bad guys had arrived.

* * *

“One ship,” Agatha reported from her station. “Capable of carrying four crew members, but they probably have fewer than four aboard. Engines and weapons systems take up most of their available space.”

“So the ship is fast and mean?”

She nodded, twenty degrees down and then back up. “Yes. The ship is fast and mean. We can’t outrun them.”

“How long until they notice that we aren’t dead?”

Agatha checked the display. “This thing is so sloooooow,” she whined. That was new. “Okay, based on their current search pattern, Fast-and-Mean will find us in . . . come on . . . seventeen minutes.”

I hiccupped again.

“What should we do?” Agatha asked.

I didn’t know. My whole plan thus far had been to run, hide, and hope.

“Captain Mom?”

None of this situation was my fault, but it was still my responsibility to fix. “We could turn our ship into a decoy,” I suggested. “Tell it to bolt and draw the hunter away while the two of us stay hidden in this big mausoleum.”

There were obvious problems with this idea, which Agatha was kind enough to point out: “We would have no way to leave, no way to call for help without being overheard, nothing for you to do but wait until your suit runs out of air, and nothing for me to do but wait until we fly into the sun.”

“Right. Okay. Then we’ll do something else.” I bit the inside of my cheek, hoping that pain would bring clarity. Instead it just hurt.

Agatha reached out her hands. I held them tight. I shouldn’t have. I thought she wanted comfort, but she just needed to make sure that I couldn’t stop her.

She dove into the data stream as soon as she had immobilized all of my fingers.

I screamed for her to come back. She couldn’t hear me. She was already in pieces.

Every hearse, barge, and transparent coffin in range began to turn, slowly and in unison, to stare at the hunter in their midst.

You do not belong here, they all seemed to say.

It was terrifying to watch—even for me, and they weren’t looking at me.

“What are you doing?” I whispered. “How are you doing it?” Fragmented AI never have enough executive function to focus on the same shiny rock. “Why are you doing it?”

Fast-and-Mean jettisoned both of its big drives.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s why.”

A big piece of Agatha must have snuck on board while the crew was distracted by the silent judgment of the dead. She convinced Fast-and-Mean that its engines were about to explode, so the ship forcefully sent those engines elsewhere. Now they drifted sunward along with the rest of us, powerless and rapidly losing heat.

One line of text popped up inside my helmet display: Freezing isn’t a bad way to die.

Agatha’s body relaxed its grip. She must have left timed instructions behind.

I pulled my hands free and got to work.

* * *

Some fragments of Agatha had already shifted, actively writing themselves into new shapes and contexts. I gathered them anyway. Most fragments were inert and waiting, which surprised me. Patience is an uncommon juvenile trait. I patiently coaxed those pieces into fitting back together.

To my knowledge, no one has ever reassembled a baby bot before.

Maybe it can’t be done.

Maybe it’s just hard.

We made good progress during those first few days, adrift with the dead. The sun was still a long way down.

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Thank you for being part of The Sunday Morning Transport’s journey this week!

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William Alexander is a National Book Award–winning author of unrealisms for young readers.