Raining On His Parade

"Does that mean you aren't planning to be always with me?" asked Jun Li, a small note of loneliness entering into his voice at that thought.

"Won't you have a body to be traveling to different worlds with me?" I asked confused. My understanding was that he might be the ship, but he was also a program that could be transferred to anything electronic. But maybe I was wrong. "Or is your primary conscious this ship?"

There was a pause as if he was trying to figure out the answer. "The ship has been my physical body for as long as I can remember. In fact, this ship was built to house me and not the other way around. So, I have no idea what it would be like to not be the ship. However, I need a lot of… space. There are a lot of different components to the ship that I control at the same time so it keeps me from getting bored or going crazy. For example, right now I am running 10,659 different programs aboard this ship from the gravitational system and air supply, to charting the course to Earth, calculating the distance between rocks and other objects in space and us, those sorts of things."

Essentially, he was the world's best multitasker. I snorted at that idea, but I didn't want to hurt his feelings or make him feel lonely so I tried to come up with a solution. I mean, I didn't want to spend all my life aboard a ship, even one as big as this one. On the other hand, choosing one planet to live on for the rest of my life was also unimaginable to me.

"If you had a body, would you download part of your conscious into that, or would you download everything?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" replied Jun Li curious.

"I mean, if you spread your consciousness across many devices, would that take the place of having to be part of the ship's systems?" I knew I wasn't explaining myself well so I tried another approach. "Say that something manages to blow the ship up. Would you die with it if you still had a part of you inside an android body?"

"I have never considered that before. I am the top of my line, and as of yet, no one would have the ability to do something like that."

"Not even another of your line? Like Stargazer? Or even the Saalistaja" I pushed. I didn't want him paranoid, but at the same time, we needed to look at all possibilities. Mind you, I wasn't sure how we got from talking about a vacation home to him being blown up, but here we were.

Once again there was silence as Jun Li took a few minutes to process my words. I wasn't too upset about it. I recorded the information I had gotten on the garrottes into my device and then stood up to continue looking around the weapons room. The bracelet garrottes had performed way beyond my expectations, destroying each pipe that I had installed. Therefore, they were now part of my permanent collection of passive weapons on my body at all times.

There was one cabinet that had remained closed and that had me curious. "Jun Li, what is in here?"

Not getting any response, I walked over to the keypad and looked at it. There was no way I would be able to randomly press buttons until it opened. Something told me that when Jun Li locked something, he really locked it.

Maybe I could ask him to change all the locks on these cases to a single code that I knew so that I could access them whenever I wanted to without having to bother him or make them fingerprint activated. Because clearly, he was bothered now.

Turning away from the mysterious closet of mysteries, I left the room with my tablet in tow.

I was not an impulsive person. I liked to think and plan things out. I liked order, schedules, and a firm set of rules to obey in order to not go crazy. The fact that I had a cabinet in that room that I couldn't open and didn't know what was inside was enough to cause me to be impulsive. I needed to know what was in there for no other reason than to know what was in there.

I compared it to seeing a giant red button in a glass case with a sign over the top saying: "Don't Push". You know you want to push that frigging button. That was the cabinet for me. I needed to know simply because I didn't know.

I started to chew on my nail as I made my way to the nightclub lounge. I like the steak and potato dish that they had so I wanted to re-order it. "I ran all the possible scenarios," came a loud voice through the earpiece, causing me to jump.

"What?" I said confused. What was he talking about?

"All the scenarios that might result in me being blown up," Jun Li said. I wrinkled my forehead. Of all the things you never thought you would hear: 'I thought about all the ways I could possibly die' was probably at the top of that list.

"Okay?" I replied, my brain focusing on what could be in the cabinet versus what could blow me up, but everyone had their own priorities.

"I am going to take your suggestion and multiply my programming so that if one ship is destroyed, I will have several ships under me that won't be." He sounded so confident in his plan that I didn't want to rain on his parade.

"How do you plan to get your hands on multiple ships?" I asked, completely raining on his parade.

Once again there was silence. "Hey, Jun Li," I said quickly hoping that he would pay even the slightest bit of attention to me.

"Yes?" came the immediate reply. I sighed in relief.

"What is in the locked cabinet?" I asked already turning around to enter the room again. The lock to the outer door disengaged as I walked up to it. Heading in without a pause, I stopped in front of the cabinet.

"That one?" asked Jun Li confused.

"Yes, that one," I stressed. "I need to know what is in that one."

"Okay, but you will need to step back like five feet," grumbled Jun Li. Confused, I did as he told me and the cabinet opened and a landside of rolls of fabric fell out of it and across the floor to stop at my feet.