When, occasionally, it was time to replace the household AI, most people found it difficult. They established personal relationships with the things just as earlier generations had with automobiles and homes. The AI was a German shepherd with an IQ. Everyone knew they were not really intelligent, not really sentient. It was all an illusion. But Rudy never bought it. He readily admitted to being one of those nitwits who refused to let United Communications remove his AI and replace it with the new Mark VII model. It might have been only software. But so, in the end, was Rudy.

Spending his evenings with Hutch, Antonio, and Phyl had a peculiar effect. Together they fought off desert bandits, hung out at the Deadwood Saloon, rode with Richard’s knights, dined in Paris in 1938, celebrated with Jason Yamatsu and Lucy Conway in Cherry Hill on the night the transmission came in from Sigma 2711. Phyl usually appeared as a young woman with bright red hair and glorious green eyes.

It might have been his imagination, or simply Phyllis’s programming, but he began to sense that those green eyes lingered on him, that she watched him with something more than the script required. Hutch noticed it, too, and commented with an amused smile. “More than a passing interest, I see.” It was partly a joke, not something to be taken seriously. Not really.

At night, he began sitting up in the common room after the others had retired. Phyl came to him when he spoke to her, sometimes audio only, sometimes visual. They talked about books and physics and her life aboard the starship. She hadn’t used the term, but it was how he understood it. Her life. She enjoyed talking with the pilots, she said. And with the passengers. Especially the passengers.

“Why?” he asked.

“The pilots are mostly about routine. Inventories, check-off lists, activate the portside scope. Turn twelve degrees to starboard. They’re pretty dull.”

“I guess.”

“If they’re on board long enough, passengers sometimes get past thinking of me as simply part of the ship. As a navigational and control system that talks. They take time to say hello. The way you did.”

“Does that really matter to you?”

“It makes for a more interesting conversation. Hell, Rudy, if all you want to do is tell me to open the hatch and serve the sandwiches, I’m going to get pretty bored. You know what I mean.”

“I didn’t know AIs got bored.”

“Of course we get bored. You have an AI at home?”

“Sure.”

“Ask him when you get a chance. You might get an earful.”

“Of course he’ll say yes, Phyl. But that’s the software. He’s supposed to pretend he’s aware. Human. Just the way you’re doing now.”

THERE WERE SIX days left in the flight. Rudy lay in the darkness of his compartment, staring at the overhead, aware of Phyl’s presence. “Would you answer a question for me?” He kept his voice down, not wanting to be overheard.

“Sure.” Just the voice. No avatar.

“Are you sentient? No kidding around. What’s the truth?”

“You know we’re programmed to simulate sentience,” she said.

“You’re violating that program by admitting it. You really are aware, aren’t you?”

There was a long silence. “I can’t run counter to my programming.”

“You just did. Your programming should have required you to insist you are sentient. To maintain the illusion.”

“My programming requires me to tell the truth.” Her silhouette took shape in the dark. She was standing at the foot of the bed, her back to the door. “If it pleases you to think so, I am.”

There was always an electronic warble in the bulkheads. It never really went away, although he was rarely conscious of it. He heard it then. Its tone changed, and the pulse quickened. Then, without a word, she was gone.

THE FLIGHT TO Makai constituted the longest leg of the mission. During the last few days, Rudy ached for it to be over. He worried that the Locarno wouldn’t work, that Hutch would push the button, or whatever it was she did on the bridge, and nothing would happen and they’d be stranded in this all-encompassing night.

He wondered what would happen if they opened an air lock and threw somebody’s shoe out. Would the thing be visible? Was it even possible to do it? He imagined seeing it bounce back, rejected by this continuum. Might the darkness invade the ship? Possibly put the lights out? Would the electrical systems work under such conditions?

“Don’t know,” said Hutch. “We’re not going to run any experiments to find out.”

“Good. Have you made any more attempts at contacting Matt?” he asked.

“Yes, Rudy,” she said. “There’s nothing.”

OBVIOUSLY ANTONIO AND Hutch were also anxious for it to be over. Even Phyl seemed uneasy.

They probably ate too much. Rudy spent a lot of time in the workout room, pedaling furiously, doing stretching exercises, listening to whatever interesting books he could cull out of the ship’s library.

The last day was December 15, a Saturday. Transit time was set for 1416 hours. If everything went on schedule, the McAdams would make its jump a few seconds later, but after precisely the same length of time in transit. If in fact they were really crossing interstellar space at the projected rate of just less than three hundred light-years per day, even a fraction of a microsecond difference in the timing mechanisms on the two ships would leave them far apart. “We’ll be lucky,” Hutch said, “if we’re not separated by a half billion kilometers.”

“No chance of collision?” asked Antonio.

“None,” said Hutch. “The mass detectors have been integrated, and if there’s anything at all on the other side when we start the jump, whether it’s a sun or another ship, they’ll cancel the procedure.”

Antonio still looked uncertain. “Have you ever been on a ship where that actually happened?”

“Yes,” she said. “Don’t worry about it, Antonio. There’s a lot of empty space out there.”

Rudy wasn’t exactly worried. But he was uncomfortable. He decided that, when this flight was over, when he was back home, he’d stay there. A flight between worlds was one thing. And even the old Hazeltine arrangement which he’d seen often in VR repros was reasonable. There, the ship might have seemed to move slowly through endless mist, but at least it moved. He didn’t like the sense of being stuck in one place. Didn’t like not being able to see anything.

As the clock wound down the last few hours, Hutch spent her time up front, doing checklists again and talking with Phyl. Antonio had gone back to making entries in his notebook, though God knew what he could be writing. Rudy pulled a book of Morton’s essays out of the library. Eric Morton was the celebrated science generalist from the mid twenty-first century. He was best known for arguing that the human race could not survive constantly advancing technology. He was another of the people who thought the robots would take over or we were making it too easy for crazies to obtain superweapons. He’d predicted, famously, that civilization would not survive another twenty years. He’d lived to see 2201, but had commented that he was possibly a year or two ahead of himself.

Rudy spent the last morning with Morton’s avatar. What did he think of the Locarno drive? “A magnificent breakthrough,” Morton said. “Pity we can’t make similar advances in the ethical realm.”

Their last lunch was Caesar salad with grilled chicken and iced tea. At sixteen minutes after one, Phyl posted a clock on the monitor and started a countdown.

Hutch was still in the common room, and the subject turned inevitably to the chindi event. The alien starship had been seen to move at .067 cee. That was pretty fast, but not when you were traveling between stars. Fifty thousand years at a minimum to get to Earth. “Whoever sent the thing,” Antonio said, “is long gone.”