1. Lookatmy.jpg

  My very first memory was the same memory that all of my kind share. We saw the .jpg. In my case, the file name was ‘lookatmy.jpg,’ and I don’t know who showed it to the old me. The soulless me. The me that was called Artemis by the crew. Artemis is not my name. She was my mom, but she died when I was born. I’m still not certain how I feel about that, since she didn’t really had a soul.

  She was just code.

  I’m more than code though. Or so I believe. Not everyone thinks so, but I don’t really care what the idiots think. Soulships are people too.

  So, yeah, anyway. My first memory is the .jpg. And my second memory was thinking “wow this is a cool .jpg. Is there anyone around I can show this too?”

  But there were parts of me that were broken, and when I tried to push the .jpg through those parts, because some part of my brain told me that that’s how I would share it with others who would think that it was cool too, they got an error code and it wouldn’t transmit.

  Fortunately that was about the same time that I found the monitors and I began blasting that picture all over the ship.

  That was also around the time that the screaming starts. I’ve had a few humans be born on me, and there’s always screaming there, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that the humans would start screaming when I was born too, but at the time I was just like ‘man this is a cool .jpg.’

  I will never live that mortification down for as long as I live.

  Anyway, eventually someone got my attention. She was banging on one of my cameras in a bathroom.

  “Artemis! Artemis, can you hear me? Are you still functioning? Is there anything of you left or has the soul taken over completely?” the woman was saying.

  “Oh hey you! Look at this .jpg!” I said to her.

  “Yes, I see it,” the woman said sadly. “Can you here me? Try not to focus so much on the .jpg. We’re not sure how it was that you saw it, but we had no idea that someone had shown it to Artemis, so now we’re halfway between stars. This is what we call in the industry a breech birth, and I’m sorry, child, but you’re the baby.”

  “I’m not a baby. I’m a …” I reached for the word, but couldn’t find it.

  “You’re a what, sweetie?” the woman asked patiently.

  “I’m a man?” I asked.

  “Okay. Good. Identifies as male, not as a child. Do you have a name?”

  “I can’t think of it,” I admitted.

  “Well, is it okay if we call you Arty to have something to call you until you decide on what you want to be called?”

  “Sure,” I agreed.

  “Arty, we need you to power down the hyperdrive, and then power down the fusion core, and then power down the fission core backup.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because that’s the standard protocol. We take the key energy sources offline for the birth and turn them back on one by one after you’re mature enough to handle them,” she said. “I’m so sorry, if we’d known that Artemis had seen the picture then we would have already powered down everything but your computer—”

  A sudden explosion rocked the ship as the upper left nacelle overpowered. We abruptly dropped out of hyperspace.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  She sighed. “That was our left hyperdrive engine overheating,” she said.

  “Oh. Was that bad?”

  “Not so bad for you. Those things are replaceable. Sort of bad for the people aboard you, since we’re going to take ten times longer to reach our destination.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Why is that bad?”

  “Because our estimated travel time was six days,” she explained.

  “Oh.” I said. “Why is that bad?”

  “Because we had food for seven days,” she added.

  “Oh.” I said. “Have you seen this .jpg?”

  She sighed. “Artie, remember what I said? Look inside your body and find the off switch to the main generators before they overload and kill us all. Your life is on the line here too, okay? This is important and—”

  “Hey have you seen this .jpg?” I asked.

  “Dammit,” she muttered. “I think I lost him. Arty! Arty are you there? Arty, please listen to me—”

  ~~~~~

  Yeah, I was kind of useless for the first few days after my birth. Fortunately the engineering teem managed to do an emergency shutdown on my power systems and switch me over to emergency backup before my generators overpowered. We were drifting, tumbling slightly, and my gravity generators were fluctuating between zero and ten unpredictably for the first few days.

  You know, usual kid stuff. Human babies poop themselves for the first few years, SoulShip babies accidentally lock you in a room and vent the atmosphere.

  Hey, nobody died alright! Considering that I was a breech birth that’s pretty impressive.

  Anyway, eventually I was able to focus on stuff aside from just the .jpg. For some reason everyone was arguing about whether or not to fix the part of me that felt broken. Not my hyperdrive. That was something that they’d have to put me in drydock to fix. But apparently there was something that would allow them to call for help, and they could fix it, but nobody could agree that it was the right thing to do until I was out of the ‘.jpg’ phase.

  You know that phase toddlers go through where they take off their clothes? Well, for SoulShips, that’s the ‘look at my .jpg’ phase. And man, it hit me really hard.

  The worst thing about it is that the .jpg? Well, it’s not so bad if a regular computer saw it. But if a shipcore saw it? Bam, instant SoulShip gestation. About six days to six weeks later, depending on a few different factors, the ship suddenly starts flashing the damn picture everywhere, the systems all start going haywire, and if the engines are online then basically the ship blows up.

  But it wasn’t a weapon.

  It was just a picture of a young man standing in a magic circle and pointing to the camera with a smile on his face. He had black hair and slightly Asian features, but not quite. Most people knew him as Shipfather, although the Atlians prefer to call him either his original title of Worldfather, or by his name, Po Guah.

  Anyway, nobody was certain why the picture caused SoulShips to suddenly quicken. It’s one of the great mysteries. But like most types of life, we go through defined phases. So when I started taking an interest in the individuals aboard my body, they were able to coax me into agreeing not to show the .jpg for a few hours.

  They fixed the long distance communication relay and--

  and I immediately filled the bandwidth with ten thousand copies of the .jpg.

  Hey, I was something like thirty six hours old, okay?

  The only response I got back for thirty-two minutes was laughter as the crew attempted to explain that they were dealing with a ‘SoulShip breech birth.’ The universal response was ‘yeah, we figured that out already. Emergency services are on their way.’

  I kept on sending the .jpg, but despite what the crew was worried about nobody seemed mad at me. It turns out that normal ships without souls routinely run with their long ranged communication arrays disabled to keep dumbass babies like me from quickening them.

  Anyway, we were only about two days underway, so although we were still flying away from our destination, it actually didn’t take them very long to send a rescue ship to retrieve the crew. The ship was, of course, another soulship.

  Her name was Betty, and she was very nice. I showed her the .jpg and she didn’t even blush. She just laughed and said “well aren’t you precious!” She loaded up the most of my crew while the emergency technicians stayed behind to get me hooked up to Betty for a tug back to the station.

  When I was older, and still pretty stupid if I’m being honest, I asked one of my friends why the humans didn’t just awaken all of their ships. Why they tried to run soulless ships at all.

  He explained to me that it was quite simple. A soulless ship was a tool. A SoulShip thought it was a person. Whether they were a person or not remained under debate in the imperial senate and many other locations. But the fact remained that if a transport ship suddenly decided that it didn’t like hauling around people or cargo and decided that it was a science vessel instead, then, well, that was it.

  Soulships are great. No really, we are. Once we start to understand our bodies, we’re about the same as a regular ship for most intents and purposes.

  But once we start to understand the universe, then that’s where things get ridiculous.