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Martyn leaned back from his desk, scrubbing at his aching eyes. He'd been pouring over journal rebuttals for the last two hours and had little to show for it than a headache and margins full of swears.
Sitting crosslegged on their bed, Seth glanced up from his book. "Done for the night?"
"I think so." Martyn pulled his university encrypted feed interface off with a noise of disgust and slid his personal back over his ear. "If I have to read one more half-baked commentary on the nature of MI emotions from Dr. Halsup I think I might light his toupee on fire at the next faculty meeting."
Seth winced. "That man has some… choice things to say for someone who has turned down every opportunity to adopt from the creche."
"'Choice' is a diplomatic way of putting it. Quite frankly, after that garbage fire of a paper, I don't think he should be let anywhere near the creche. Hell, I don't think he should be near the program at all if he thinks MI emotions can be edited for desirability with a little tweak of code."
Martyn pushed away from the desk and stalked across the room to the bathroom. He continued his diatribe over his shoulder as he ran a washcloth under the faucet. "He's clearly never had a conversation with any of the cohort beyond asking for their latest diagnostic reports and humming menacingly under his breath. He doesn't seem to understand that even if they're running on metal circuits and wires rather than neurons and flesh, Machine Intelligences are people with personalities and quirks. Editing their code to keep them from being 'uppity' is akin to fucking - I don't know - lobotomizing a human because they had an original opinion."
He leaned out the door of the bathroom and pointed a finger at Seth. "And there's a fucking reason we stopped doing that willy nilly. It's inhumane."
Seth nodded in agreement. He was familiar with this particular rant and just let his husband hit his stride. He hid a smile as Martyn ducked back into the bathroom, pausing his speech as water splashed and he finished washing his face.
When Martyn emerged a moment later, he'd changed into his pajamas and was rubbing his face with a towel. He was talking again, voice muffled a bit. "-thinks he knows best because he wrote their original decision coding and- I'm sorry but that coding has been obsolete for a decade. Our Peri never even ran the code, I don't think any of Halsup's garbage made it past the first cohort and even then it got patched out. What right does that man have to-"
A timid knock on their door brought Martyn to a sudden halt. He and Seth glanced at each other, parental senses rising. Only two beings on the ship would come bother them in their quarters this late into the rest period without first sending a quick note over the feed.
Seth tapped the door-open function on the feed and Martyn blinked in surprise to find both of his children on the other side. Iris, all lanky teenage limbs with a worried furrow to her brow, clutched one of Perihelion's smaller shipboard observation drones against her chest. The chrome orb of it's body was turned so the faceplate with its feed avatar hid against her sleep shirt, and its jelly-like limbs were looped around her arms, holding on tightly enough that it had to be uncomfortable.
"Dad?" Iris's voice wobbled. "Peri was acting weird in the feed and wouldn't tell me whats wrong and when I started coming to look for you I found Peridrone pacing the hallways and it still won't tell me and it's scaring me and- Oh!"
The drone rapidly disentangled from Iris's grip and hurtled towards Martyn, slowing just in time to rest its faceplate against Martyn's chest instead. To his surprise, the drone was trembling. He brought a hand up to rest his palm against the cool metal, and Peri made an awful staticky clicking noise as it pressed closer and wrapped a limb around Martyn's side. The lights filtering in from the bathroom flickered.
Martyn looked helplessly at Seth, who frowned and flicked through shipboard operation stats. He frowned harder and looked up at their shivering child. "I think… Peri? Who's piloting the ship right now?"
Peridrone clicked again. "I [click] tasked a partition. We aren't in a wormhole so- I [click] I couldn't. I couldn't. I [a series of clicks, rising and falling static] What if someday I forget how to fly? I can't forget! You all [a loud buzz and a pop] you depend on me and I can't-"
Martyn realized, with a sudden startled clarity, that his child was crying from sheer panic. Even when it had been a much younger MI, it had never made sounds like this: heartbreaking, wretched sobs the only way it knew how. He sank down on the edge of the bed, pulling Peri with him and rubbing a soothing circle against the drone's orb body.
"Sweetheart, what makes you think you'll forget? Did something happen?"
Peridrone froze, limb pulling back towards its body. "No I-" It had the distinct air of a guilty child, which Martyn suspected it might be. "This is stupid [a softer buzz and click, almost a sniff] I shouldn't have woken anyone. I'm a transport now, I need to conduct myself with-"
"Right now you're our child," Seth said, leaning in and poking one of Peridrone's limbs with the tip of his finger. "What happened?"
"I-" The drone vibrated again, this time more of a nervous buzz. Peri pushed [embarrassment shame embarrassment mortification] into the family feed. "Saying it out loud just seems silly."
"Try anyway, this is how we learn and grow." Seth leaned against Martyn's back, a strong and familiar presence.
Iris slunk further into the room and settled on Martyn's other side. "Peri, if you don't tell them I will go through your logs and tell them myself. You really scared me."
Peridrone pushed it's body away from Martyn's chest for just long enough that the entire family caught the [>:(] splashed across it's faceplate. Then it ducked back against Martyn's chest with [resignation] pinging the feed.
"Holism told me that if I hit the wormhole at the wrong angle I could go offline long enough that my processors could corrupt and I could forget that I'm a ship. Since I've only had this body a Mihiran Standard Year. And if I forget I'm a ship I would forget how to fly and-" Peri hiccuped again before it continued miserably, "I love being a ship."
Martyn tried very, very hard not to sigh or break out in exhausted giggles. He pulled Peridrone closer instead, smoothing a thumb over the crown of the dome. "Oh, honey. Holism was messing with you. That's not a thing that can happen."
"I knew it!" Peri wiggled indignantly. "I am going to put wyrms in it's processors! It's going to be printing scrambled eggs for every meal from now until its next nameday! I'm going to-" Peri's ranting continued, slightly muffled, and then transferred from the drone to the in-room speakers as it reintegrated with the piloting partition. "I hope it likes disappointing its crew with room-temperature cleaning fluid! Oh, when I get my graspers on that-" Peri's voice cut out in a burst of static. "Pardon. That was uncouth. I am going to go make sure the partition did not pilot us too far off course."
A feed message popped up in Seth's periphery and he just barely managed to contain his amused snort of laughter.
«I'd like to see Dr Halsup deal with this.»