by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Voyage of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
During the few seconds Captain Carroway had to herself between meetings, she had just enough time to doubt every decision she’d been making and everything she’d said all day long to her crew.
What had she been thinking making an anthropomorphic toadstool who just happened to grow into a person on her bridge into an ensign without even talking to them first? That decision had been certifiably insane, and Captain Carroway dreaded what she might learn about Ensign Mike when they showed up and started talking to her.
Captain Carroway’s fur — which was already naturally very fluffy all the time — fluffed out, making her uniform feel tight and itchy. Her tail lashed with a laconic, angry beat like a death knell drum.
By the time Ensign Mike appeared in the door to Captain Carroway’s quarters, the Norwegian Forest cat had fully convinced herself that the only rational choice was to strip Mike of their rank, turn Commander Chestnut’s quarters into a brig — since The Wanderlust didn’t have one — and lock the fungal officer in there until it could be truly established who or what they really were and how they’d come into existence and whether more similar things were likely to happen in the future.
Captain Carroway would simply have to take the hit to her credibility with the rest of the crew that would come from walking back one of her own decisions — namely making Mike an ensign — so quickly and thoroughly.
A captain who makes rash decisions and then rashly unmakes them, overcorrecting in the other direction, is not a good captain. Perhaps the whole ship would be better off with Commander Chestnut in charge. The golden-mantled squirrel seemed like he’d make a very good and diplomatic captain, even if he did bewilderingly see himself as a warrior rather than a diplomat.
At least, Commander Chestnut hadn’t made half as many questionable decisions today as Captain Carroway had. Of course… that might partly be because he hadn’t made half as many decisions.
Being in charge was hard. Captain Carroway wasn’t sure she liked it. But then, usually, new captains weren’t flung to the far side of the cosmos and expected to lead a crew that was fifty-percent composed of her enemies and more than a tenth composed of spontaneously generated mushroom people.
Speaking of mushroom people, Ensign Mike was standing in her doorway — which the Morphicans had left open — politely waiting to be noticed.
“Hello, Mike,” Captain Carroway meowed. “Come on in.” Simply speaking those completely pedestrian words felt like a huge effort. Captain Carroway did not want Ensign Mike to come in. She wanted to lock herself in her quarters, all alone, and not evaluate an entirely new lifeform for whether they could be trusted as an officer or should possibly be stripped of their flesh in addition to their rank, returning them to the much more normal state of being a computer implant that didn’t walk around claiming to be named Mike.
The fungal officer came in. Their stubby little feet made fleshy slapping sounds against the metal floor. And their row of slit-like eyes blinked at the captain from the underside of their pink mushroom cap. But they did not sit down when Captain Carroway gestured at the couch. They didn’t sit down until she specifically told them to.
Cutting right to the chase, Captain Carroway meowed, “What are you, Mike?”
“I don’t understand the question,” Ensign Mike replied mushily. “In what sense?”
“Well, I know what you’re composed of — Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s computer implant and fungal tissue grown from the mycelial aspects of The Wanderlust’s shipboard computer. Is that correct?” Captain Carroway’s tail had not stopped lashing.
“Yes, that’s correct,” Ensign Mike agreed.
“So you’re mostly computer?” The Norwegian Forest cat narrowed her green eyes.
“I wouldn’t say that.” The mushroom blinked back at her.
“Then what would you say?”
“What would you like me to say?”
Captain Carroway’s first reaction to the mushroom’s question was annoyance. She felt like she was trapped in some sort of bad comedy routine or maybe a riddle. But she rarely let her first reactions control her, and with a little more thought, she realized it might be a valid question. What did she want from Ensign Mike?
It would be easier for Captain Carroway if Mike somehow disassembled, their fungal flesh crawling back into The Wanderlust’s computers, leaving Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s computer implant in its original condition, merely needing a complex brain surgery to go back where it belonged in the rabbit-like alien’s brow.
But Captain Carroway didn’t think she could say that to the fleshy pink-and-gray person sitting in front of her. It’s uncouth — at best — to tell someone else that you’d like them to reverse their existence and disappear.
Or is it? Captain Carroway wondered. Was Ensign Mike really a person, or did they just seem like a person? Maybe Captain Carroway was making this harder for herself than it needed to be, essentially treating a chair like a person and being overly concerned about the chair’s feelings when it didn’t actually have any.
The Wanderlust’s computer wasn’t designed to have feelings or think of itself as a person. And Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s computer implant was specifically designed to suppress feelings, not experience them.
“I think,” Captain Carroway began hesitantly, “that I’m trying to figure out if you’re a person.” No big deal. No pressure. She just needed to solve the philosophical problems posed by the Turing Test right now, right here, right away so that she could figure out how to proceed. “Do you… think that you’re a person?” The Norwegian Forest cat leaned forward, fascinated by this question, in spite of herself. “Do you feel like you’re a person?”
“What does a person feel like?” Ensign Mike asked, blinking again.
Captain Carroway’s tail lashed harder, and the fur around her shoulders prickled up again. She really couldn’t tell if she was dealing with a memetic object that merely mimed personhood… or simply an annoying person.
To be fair, if Ensign Mike was a person, they were less than a day old. Kittens and puppies — though adorable — are extremely annoying. A baby mushroom person would probably be inherently annoying too. Though, also, babies aren’t usually made into ensigns.
Captain Carroway did her best to soothe her own agitation and irritation internally and grapple with Ensign Mike’s question at face value. What did it feel like to be a person?
Captain Carroway investigated her own feelings. Right now, for her, being a person felt like being tired. Wanting to sleep. Wishing for comfort that wasn’t available. But she knew it didn’t always feel like that.
What were the commonalities? The things that stayed constant?
When Captain Carroway thought hard about it, she imagined the closest thing to a constant was this: she always wanted something. Maybe she just wanted to be left alone. Or to feel differently. Or even, on her worst days — the absolute lowest points, even worse than the chaos she’d been going through since receiving her cursed promotion to captain — for everything to be finally over.
“I think, maybe,” Captain Carroway hazarded, feeling somehow more out of her depth than she’d felt any other time during this wild and crazy day, “that being a person feels like wanting something. Anything. Different people want different things, and even the same person will want different things at different times. Is there anything that you want, Mike?” Captain Carroway’s pupils constricted, making her already sharp green eyes look even sharper and more piercing.
The pinky-gray toadstool stared right back at the Norwegian Forest cat for a long time. Their slitted eyes occasionally blinked, sometimes all together and sometimes only a few at a time or in a complicated pattern that almost seemed to hold meaning. Captain Carroway started to wonder if the mushroom person had heard her question or if maybe the question had broken them like how logical paradoxes were always breaking computers in old sci-fi movies.
Finally, Ensign Mike opened their mouth and said something Captain Carroway could never have expected, but in retrospect, it seemed perfectly obvious.
“I want everyone else to be calm and have access to any data they need for making good decisions made available to them as quickly as possible.”
Now Captain Carroway blinked. “That’s almost exactly the role that you– uh, I mean, the computer implant you grew from was designed to perform for Lt. Cmdr. Vossie.”
“Well, then, I suppose it’s logical that it’s what I want too.”
The Norwegian Forest cat frowned, her whiskers turning downward. “Isn’t there anything that you want for yourself? I mean, what if the best way to make everyone else happy was to dissolve your mushroom flesh and return the implant inside of you to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s head?”
Ensign Mike blinked all of their eyes at once, and suddenly Captain Carroway felt bad for the cruelty of what she’d just said. But was it cruel? Only if Mike was a person. And she still wasn’t convinced they were.
“How would you feel about that, Mike?” Captain Carroway pressed. “Do you… want to continue existing?”
After an even longer, more uncomfortable pause than before, the toadstool said, “I think I would like to continue existing… outside of this conversation. Inside of this conversation, though, I am beginning to feel very uncomfortable, and I think what I want most of all is for this conversation to be over.”
Now Captain Carroway really did feel bad, but also annoyed. After all the careful work she’d done all day long to try to win over her new Anti-Ra officers, the Norwegian Forest cat had possibly just alienated the first ever fungal officer in the Tri-Galactic Union. But she’d needed to press hard on them — it would do no good to treat Ensign Mike like a person only to find them fracturing and acting more like a malfunctioning uni-meter later, potentially during a crisis. If Ensign Mike was going to be a member of the crew, they needed to be able to handle something as low pressure as an uncomfortable conversation with their superior officer.
A nagging voice in Captain Carroway’s head asked though: did Mike need to be able to handle a conversation where their superior officer implied she might murder them or that maybe they should commit suicide? Because if she stepped all the way back from this conversation and looked at it from the outside, taking Ensign Mike completely at face value… That was kind of what this conversation looked like, and that was not a good look.
Captain Carroway didn’t appreciate the positions she’d found herself put in today. That wasn’t the mushroom’s fault or even the Anti-Ras’ fault. But they all sure had participated.
“Fortunately, Ensign Mike, I think I can arrange for you to have that particular desire met. This conversation is almost over. However, I do want to discuss one final thing: Lt. Cmdr. Vossie.”
“What about him?” Ensign Mike asked mushily.
Captain Carroway’s ears skewed as it occurred to her how extremely good the mushroom’s social skills were for a being who was only a few hours old. “How do you do that?” she asked, pointedly, distracted from her original topic for the moment. “How are you this good at conversation when, as far as I know, this is the first real conversation you’ve ever had?”
“That’s not true,” Ensign Mike insisted. “I’ve had many conversations before. Hundreds of thousands.”
“How?” Captain Carroway drew out the question, making a whole meal of a single word that shouldn’t have amounted to more than a quick snack.
“I remember conversing with Lt. Lee many times as The Wanderlust’s computer, and I’ve been talking to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie inside his head since he was a mere whippersnapper of a Morphican. Besides, The Wanderlust’s entertainment archives contain thousands of movies and shows that I’ve absorbed, so even if I wasn’t involved in those conversations directly, I know the rhythm of them. How they should sound, the ways they go. I do admit…” The mushroom paused pensively. “It’s different speaking the words myself, out loud, with this mouth.” Ensign Mike’s slit-like eyes brightened, and they said, “It’s strange to have a mouth, isn’t it?”
For a flash of a moment, Captain Carroway was tempted to agree with the mushroom person. It is strange to have a mouth. Almost everything about physical bodies is strange. But her snarky, tired side won out over her better nature, and she snapped, “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never existed in any other way.”
The fungal officer nodded their mushroom cap head slowly, almost sadly. “Well, I have. As The Wanderlust’s computer, I had nothing like a mouth, and as Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s implant, I could monitor his mouth, but it wasn’t the same. Having a mouth of my own is very strange.”
Captain Carroway’s ears skewed even farther backward. She supposed that Ensign Mike must understand the meaning of her ears twisting back like that. As they said, they’d absorbed the content of many movies and shows. Those videos would certainly have showed cats skewing their ears, and the reactions of other characters would have made the meaning clear. But somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to straighten up her ears for a person that was merely the amalgamation of two computer systems bumping into each other and blending together into something new and weird. The Norwegian Forest cat didn’t like being lectured by a newborn baby mushroom — who she’d made an ensign in a flash of madness — about how weird they felt about simple facts of physical existence that she’d been forced to think of as ordinary for her whole life.
Somehow, talking to this mushroom made Captain Carroway feel like defending things she’d never felt like defending before. The Norwegian Forest cat didn’t like who she was being right now. So, perhaps, that was one thing she and Ensign Mike could definitely agree on: they both wanted out of this conversation.
But first, Captain Carroway had to fulfill a promise to her friend.
“About, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie,” the Norwegian Forest cat meowed. “You must have a lot of… memories… of very private thoughts and information.”
Captain Carroway wasn’t sure if she imagined it, but it looked like the underside of Ensign Mike’s pinky-gray mushroom cap blushed a brighter shade of pink. When the fungal officer spoke, their mushy voice was low and serious, “Lt. Cmdr. Vossie can count on my complete and absolute discretion. I would never betray his confidences. He can think of anything we shared together as shared with either a therapist, absolutely bound by confidentiality, or…” Somehow the mushroom’s voice got even quieter, like the sound of wind whispering through wet leaves. “…the closest of childhood friends. If there is anything I can do for him, to ease this transition, simply say the word, and I will do it.”
Perhaps, here was another thing that the mushroom and the Norwegian Forest cat could agree upon: they both cherished their connection to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie.
“I will pass your words along,” Captain Carroway meowed, satisfied by the mushroom’s obvious sincerity.
“I would appreciate that.” Ensign Mike nodded their mushroom cap head again, looking oddly shy, like they were afraid of the idea of speaking to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie directly. It must be strange for them to go from sharing the rabbit-like alien’s private thoughts to only seeing him from the outside now, as separated from him as from every other person.
Captain Carroway couldn’t imagine what the mushroom person was feeling, and she didn’t want to. She wanted this day to be over. She wanted to be finished with this weird transition. The ship she was captaining — and the ship’s crew — were strange enough in their own right that she couldn’t deal anymore with the combination of strangeness and liminality inherent to today. The Norwegian Forest cat hoped that when she went to sleep tonight, somehow, the whole ship would settle into the beginnings of a standard routine that would carry them forward, and ideally, carry them all the way home.
Captain Carroway dismissed Ensign Mike from her quarters and then checked in briefly with Commander Chestnut on the bridge who assured her all was going as smoothly as could be hoped for — the memorial services still lingered on between the Anti-Ra officers’ duties, but other than that, everyone was settling into their new shifts and accommodations well. The turtle-like silhouette on the main viewscreen continued to grow and brighten as they approached it, but it was still many hours away.
So, Captain Carroway left Commander Chestnut in charge, and she retired to her room for a quick, much-needed cat nap.
Continue on to Chapter 16…