Rose smiled and said, “Don’t worry. None of the vets around here would shoot you if you broke your leg.”“That’s reassuring,” Pepper said t...inking he was now in Hicksville.Donny said, “That’s our home town. What do you think?”“You don’t even have a traffic light,” Pepper said.He was more than a little underwhelmed by the town.“We don’t need one,” Donny said in a very serious tone of voice. “We do have a stop sign.”“I didn’t notice,” Pepper said.He was thinking that if you looked up hell in the. The whole time?”She nodded. “But I don’t step into the datastream much. For me, it’s more ... looking for absences. Gaps. It’s occupied my entire life. With your permission,” her voice lowered. “I’d like that work to continue.”“Of course. But you don’t have to ask ⁠—”“But I do,” she said forcefully. I looked up at her. “We’re no longer family. We are your crew. You have the responsibility of life or death over us. Do you understand?”I nodded slowly, and she gentled her tone.“An AI isn’t human;. She had a wonderful sense of humor, and we found ourselves talking about a lot of things as the day progressed. Like me, she seemed to not be entirely sure of what she was doing, so things unfolded comfortably slowly for us.As we grew more accustomed with each other however, our conversation would progress further and further into sexual flirtation. Still, we rarely even hinted at the context that had ostensibly drawn us together. One time while we were flirting, I finally told her that I was. No one had been able to sleep for the last hour and a half of the flight. Many had slept enough in the previous thirteen hours to last them a life time it seemed. Card games were worn out after the fifth hour, and everyone decided to sleep the remaining time away. Until now.Martin could just make out the outlines of the mountains in the distance, the peaks reaching high into the night sky. His heart had begun beating faster quite a while ago, and now it was racing nearly out of control. He saw.