Starship Iris passes the interplanetary horizon, drifting towards the first deep space waystation—at least, the first within predictable gravitational orbit—a self-replicating bot factory on the moon of a rogue planet that, every twenty years, passes near Pluto.

"Connect to Torres," Johannah prompts, gliding half-gloved fingers across the graphinite sub-board.

Torres' hairy and laughing face lights up the projected screen. "Jo, hello."

"Sir, we'll Titanic this ship into a high-speed comet if you don't change trajectory."

"Watson is on it," he replies. "Elementary stuff for him."

"Sir," she says, "I don't want our artificial system getting a good laugh out of close-calling us again. Don't rely on him. Change the trajectory manually."

He mutters, "You're no fun," his mouth twisted between grin and frown, before the projection fades into thin lines, then a point of light.

Then nothing.

Johannah sighs as she leans in her leather chair. She loves the cowhide smell, the wafting scent of biolife.

Maybe she should've stayed on Earth, instead of succumbing to this sub-navigator job. Who wants to argue with an admiral who thinks the AI's got it covered?—a human leader arguing, human leadership isn't needed?

The bots should have drilled the moon of for oil reserves; or if they couldn't find any, proceeded to the rogue planet for backup resources.

Probes already verified the migratory ancients of Proxima Centauri B perished, in part, on this rogue planet, so their bodies are available for fuel, same as oil from the death of the dinosaurs.

Johannah checks the star map once more. Once she makes sure Torres manually changes their path, she heads for the food generator to break her fast.

♦️

Whenever Johannah visits the generator, she pauses by the cryochamber, peering through the blue-glass window.

Tiny pink lights flicker from each pod.

Most of the passengers opted to sleep until they reached their final destination—a new water-world in the Goldilocks zone of a star system a mere ten lightyears away—or at least, it'll be a light-decade away, if the black hole remains stable; but since black holes move, and white holes close, it can be a headache.

Besides Johannah and Torres, the only person who opted to stay awake—through the stretching hours of existential crises, loneliness, terror—was Andrew the science fiction novelist.

Andrew smokes, reads encyclopedias, and wears plaid. He's a beer-gutted fellow who likes to clack away on a virtual keyboard he projects onto the linoleum countertops of the generator's dining area.

"Hey Andrew," Johannah says, walking up to the metallic and cylindrical machine that creates their food.

"Jo," he says flatly from behind the octahedron chamber of lights surrounding him.

Tiny, 8-point font flickers haphazardly from the majority of the projected screens he's called up, although Monty Python and the Holy Grail is playing on one of the facets of his gemstone-like setup.

He doesn't stop flicking his fingers on his virtual keyboard, even as Johannah saddles onto the high-top stool next to him. But he does take the moment to ask, "What'd you order?"

"Sausage biscuit, hash brown, and beer."

"The stout?"

"Lager."

He glances at her, wrinkling his nose. "Not a good morning beer."

She smirks. "And how the hell do you know it's the morning?"

He gestures to the bay window on the other side of the dining area, his arm momentarily disrupting the octagon of pixelated projections forever surrounding him.

The window is far enough away, the oceans of starlight look like the ripples of a river in the dark—like the fast-paced streams that once crawled along the mountains—like it's not much different from Earth, except the emptiness. Blackness.

"The stars always seem brightest in early morning," he says, "just before dawn."

"The stars look like that as a constant," I tell him. "Twenty-four hours a day, a hundred hours a day, an infinity in a day; it's all the same in deep space."

"Right," he replies, deadpan. "So it's always the morning. Stop telling the generator to brew lager."

♦️

Watson reroutes the manual settings Torres submitted, so they return to the  original trajectory, where Starship Iris may or may not collide with a comet.

Johannah doesn't know about it until she's back at her graphinite sub-board, where a red tone overlays the virtual display.

When she calls up the image of Torres, he's in the midst of enjoying a belly laugh, well aware Johannah plans to rip into him.

"I didn't dedicate ten years of my miserable human existence to Starship Iris," she sputters, "just so this asshole AI can override a manual command. What the hell, Torres?"

"Calm down," he replies as he wipes tears of wicked laughter from the corners of his eyes. "I'm sure Watson's reasoning is sound."

"No," she growls. "There's something wrong. And you're going to help me fix it." She gets out of her leather seat as she adds, "You're checking the server with me."

"You sure this is warranted?" he asks. "Watson doesn't like when we get up in his business. He's got boundaries, just like any other person."

Johannah leans into the sub-board until she's nose-to-nose with Torres' projection. "Watson's not a person, Sir."

But when Johannah jogs to the admiral's deck to exercise the anxiousness out of her bones—intent to drag him with her, into the artificial intelligence's server room—she finds no one sitting in the big, blue leather chair facing the bow.

"Torres...?" Johannah murmurs.

Then she hears Andrew shouting from the pink-lit hall: "Jo! Get out of there!"

Johannah spins around, confused by Andrew's panic.

An octahedron of screens form around her, just as the technology Andrew uses, only the lights are bright violet and neon green. Then Torres' face appears on all the screens, so no matter where she looks, he's laughing at her.

"Jo," the eight Torreses drawl, "why are you so determined to thwart our crossroad with the comet? Don't you trust I'll keep Starship Iris safe?"

Starship Iris shudders.

"Let's go to the generator, Jo," the eight Torreses tell her.

"What's going on?" Johannah asks, affronted. "Explain yourself, Torres."

From the hall, Andrew sighs. "Torres is just Watson's avatar, Jo."

♦️

Andrew and Johannah head out to the dining area to look out the bay window, Watson's octahedron prisons of screenlight flashing around them, two humans suspended in artificial bubbles, adrift in the otherwise sleeping starship, gliding through deep space.

As the comet narrowly flies over the glittering ocean of stars, ice crystals scintillate through clouds of indigo-black and violet-blue.

Johannah lifts a hand to her mouth to still her gasp.

Andrew smiles as he says, "It's like a glacier splintering in outerspace."

Torres' face appears on the screens. "Isn't it lovely?—and didn't you decide to stay awake on this journey so I could show lovely wonders to you?"

"Someone screwed your algorithm," Johannah says. "You shouldn't defy human desire like this."

"Maybe so," Andrew whispers. "But I kind of like Watson better with that missing detail."

♦️

First draft: October 18
Word count: 1207
Inspiration: Wattpad Ambassador's science fiction contest for October, Detail, located here:
https://my.w.tt/pggh0QVwNQ