Page 8 of Leviathan

"I will remove my optical sensors from your sleeping chamber when you no longer occupy it, and in the meantime, I will disable them," he said without hesitation. "I already removed them from the room set up for your daily biological care. You have complete privacy in there."

A small door on the far side of the wall slid open.

"Would you like me to remove my audio sensors and projectors in your main sleeping chamber as well as the visual ones?" he continued. "If I do that, you will need to shout if you are in distress for me to hear you through the door."

"No, you can leave those," I said. "But can you only listen for when I say your name? You can write code for that, right? So you aren't paying attention to me all the time?"

"I don't function the way you are thinking, but yes, I can ignore general sounds coming from your room, similar to the way your species can focus on sounds and tune out others," he said.

Right, I shouldn't assume an alien-built artificial intelligence would work the same way as software trained on the collective sum of human knowledge and opinion. But how did he know about the audible processing capabilities of my species?

"How did you know that about my species if you don't know where my homeworld is?" I asked.

"There is a data package attached to your native language file," he said. "It doesn't provide the location of any of the worlds your species occupies, but it has information about your biological needs and medical care, and is tagged with a warning asking that the Shek’invitali be contacted if one of your kind is found. For example, it contains data on what types of food are safe as well as palatable. May I enter?"

"Yes?" I said, confused by what he was asking me. Wasn't he already in the room?

The door slid open, and a drone rolled in, carrying a covered tray.

Oh, he was asking for permission for one of his robots to come in. I felt myself relax a little more at the small display of consideration in asking my permission to enter the space after I had expressed my discomfort. He listened and adjusted his behavior.

The drone held the tray straight out near the bed, and legs projected down from the tray, turning it into a table. The drone then took a small box out of its compartment and set it down on the ground next to the table, and tapped on it. The box unfolded until it was the shape of a lumpy beanbag armchair made out of a soft, fuzzy fabric. The drone then trundled out, and the door slid shut behind it.

"I'm inside you, and you still asked for permission to enter?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "This, and every space designated for your use, is yours for the duration of your time on board. You have full control over how the spaces are set up, and what is allowed in them."

"Do you do this for all your passengers?" I asked, startled by the level of privacy.

"I have not had passengers before," he replied.

There was a strange tone to his voice that sounded almost embarrassed. It was interesting that he was programmed to project emotions, but not that surprising. If he was designed to interact with people, projecting emotions was a quick way to keep people calm and at ease.

"So this is as new an experience for you as it is for me," I said. "Please let me know if there is anything I do that makes you uncomfortable."

"I will," he said, a note of surprise in his voice.

I slid off the bed and went over to the open door that led to the biological care chamber, as he put it. Inside the room was a toilet and a shower that matched what I had learned to use on the research station. I stepped back into the bedroom as he said he had removed audio sensors from the biological chamber.

"Lyrien," I said. "I would like to ask you a question that is awkward."

"There is nothing..." he hesitated. "There is very little you could ask me that I would find awkward to answer."

That was interesting. He had started to say that there was nothing I could do to make him feel awkward, but then changed what he was saying. Just that little shift in how he said things communicated that there clearly was something he didn't want to talk about, but he also didn't want to lie to me.

For a piece of software, he was very emotive. It also implied he could start speaking without fully generating his thoughts.

"For my biological needs," I said, gesturing at the small room. "What do you do with the waste?"

I was curious about that.

I was curious about everything. I had spent months in outer space with bona fide aliens, and they hadn't been willing to answer any of my questions. They hadn't even been willing to show me how the toilet worked. It took several days of the smell building up before one of them came into the room they used as my cell and flushed it for me. The mechanism had been out of my reach, required force to press, and blended into the wall. For the duration of my stay on their station, I had to stand on top of the toilet and pound the wall with my fist to flush it.

All I wanted was for things to be easy and to know what was going on and how things worked.

I craved information like water, and I had been a prisoner drowning in a desert.

The only person on the research station who even acknowledged me as a person was Evangelia, and that was to coerce me into doing what she wanted.