Eleven years after Rifka met Erasmus.

  Rifka woke both earlier, and much faster than usual. An hour earlier than her usual start to the day, the vacuum seal alarm started blaring with deafening urgency.

  “Erasmus, is there a leak?!” Rifka shouted. Erasmus always seemed to be listening, unless they had fallen asleep. Again.

  Rifka rolled off her gel bed, grabbed her auto-coveralls from the charging case, and started putting them on, quickly fastening the overlapping clasps. The clasps all needed to connect for the garment to seal. Not waiting for an answer from Erasmus, Rifka finished the manual fasteners and pressed the collar stud. The auto-coveralls sucked the fabric tight over her body and sealed into a comfortable armored and pressurized bodysuit. Rifka grabbed the enviro helmet and its air tank to prepare to fit it over her head. It wasn’t like Erasmus to wait so long to answer. The alarm ceased.

  “Erasmus?”

  “The time is 07:02 common time,” Erasmus’ feminine-simulated synth voice said from Rifka’s tablet. The voice sounded much less harsh than the first android Erasmus had used in the pod when the two had first met. “The time you specified to wake you up.”

  “Erasmus. Seriously? You could have let me sleep five more minutes. I snoozed the chime. It would have restarted. Using the emergency alarms? You can’t use the emergency alarms to wake me! What if it was an actual emergency?”

  “You specified that if you did not wake with the chime, you were to be woken ‘by any means necessary.’ If you don’t want me to use the emergency alarms, then you need to tell me an appropriate alarm to use. I am, after all, mostly asleep myself.”

  Rifka dropped the helmet onto her gel bed and swiped her hand over her face. To be fair, she was awake.

  “Isn’t a sleeping dragon a little cliche?” Rifka asked. She picked up her tablet and looked at the projected image from Erasmus on the screen.

  Erasmus’s screen-image avatar appeared as glowing blue serpent-like creature, with a crocodile-like head, curling goat-like horns, four talons, and folded white and blue wings halfway down their body. Their hex-shaped scales had shining white edges and sparked with blue electrical arcs. The image appeared to have the Dragon coiled up among a forest of cables. They looked like they had already fallen asleep on their “hoard.”

  “As Roosevelt said,” Erasmus’ voice hummed through the tablet’s speakers. “‘The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.’ I have no reason to stop dreaming just because my daughter needs a wake-up alarm.” The image of Erasmus’s avatar kept its eyes tightly shut.

  Rifka did not know why—or even how—Erasmus slept. Rifka wasn’t sure if they slept like a human did at all.

  Erasmus always claimed to be a dragon, but in 10 years, Rifka had never seen Erasmus with her own eyes. She interacted with them almost everyday, but only through computer consoles, drones, and video images. As a rebellious teen, Rifka went looking for Erasmus’ lair, but she failed to find it. The abandoned mining station LM-25 had over 100 kilometers of tunnels, and Erasmus easily manipulated any computer connected to its systems. There was no electronic map that Rifka could trust.

  But, Rifka still suspected—just as she’d done the first time they’d met—that Erasmus was not a dragon at all. Instead, they appeared to be a true self-aware AI. Rifka read a lot of stories and history about humans and AI when she first came to the station. It turned out that after her Ark-ship left Earth, the people had banned AI. Humans using AI had almost destroyed everything. But self-aware AI had become better at hiding, and inquisitions had hunted them down.

  The clues were all there that Erasmus lied about being a dragon.

  First of all dragons were not real. Sure, a lot had changed while Rifka was in the stasis. She might never have escaped it if Erasmus hadn’t saved her. And, humanity spread out into the stars since Rifka’s Ark-ship had seemingly failed. They built colonies throughout the galaxy. They founded societies and built corporations. They advanced their understanding of the universe. Rifka had a lot to learn. But, there were no factual accounts in the archives about a “real” dragon like Erasmus.

  Second, Erasmus had taught young Rifka four human languages, and a dozen different programming languages. How would a dragon—even one living in an old asteroid mining station—know so many computer programming languages?

  Third, Rifka could never find Erasmus’ body. But, she did find the specifications for quantum supercomputer hidden somewhere in the mining complex. The perfect sort of computer to house a book-loving AI.

  Obviously, Erasmus would deny it, but that just made sense if Erasmus was an outlaw of some kind.

  “If you didn’t need me to wake you up, why did you want to wake up so early?” Erasmus asked.

  “I want to check the radio telescope array. It’s doing a sweep that might detect another habitable planet around one of the neighboring stars.”

  “Not given up on that yet?” Erasmus asked, but then they decided not to wait for her answer. “Never mind. I shall fall full asleep little one. Wake me if something interesting happens.”

  Rifka wasn’t a teenager anymore, and her strange relationship with Erasmus had mostly worked its way out in her “rebellious” early teens. Now, Rifka treated Erasmus like a strange parent, and Erasmus had permission to call her their daughter.

  As a parent, Erasmus had hardly any rules. Rifka had to stay in the enormous mining station, until she was old enough to leave. While living there, Erasmus would not let her send any signals outside the massive asteroid’s metallic surface. And, Rifka knew that Erasmus monitored the computers and signals obsessively.

  Erasmus promised Rifka that she was not their prisoner. They would agree to let her leave when she turned eighteen. If she wanted. Rifka found, when she reached that age, she didn’t feel like a prisoner any more. The scientists on the ark-ship wanted a servant for humanity. On the Lonely Mountain, Rifka could find herself instead.

  Rifka knew all about princesses in towers, but this didn’t feel like Erasmus meant to hold her hostage. Of course, parts of the LM-25 weren’t accessible. Erasmus claimed those places were dangerous. Or, maybe that’s where Erasmus hid their hoard. Hard to say. But, if anything, Erasmus felt more like they were over-protective. Even now, the purportedly three-hundred year old dragon still saw Rifka as a child.

  One the other hand, no books or movies were off limits. Rifka could technically read, watch, build, or make anything she wanted. Rifka especially found that she enjoyed making things.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Almost everything Rifka could want, in fact, could be found in the 150 square meters of her station residence inside LM-25. Part workshop, part laboratory, part living space, Rifka kept the space neat, if not entirely uncluttered.

  Rifka put down the safety helmet. She stretched her arms a bit. Then, she grabbed the half-eaten nutri-bar from her bedside workbench and stuffed it in her mouth.

  The bench caught her eye briefly. Over the past week, she’d laid out the parts for her automated medical implant device.

  She’d finally been able to make the device ready for assembly. The neat rows of parts— including laser scalpels, bio electronic optic nerve implant equipment, delicate articulating bio printing assemblers—were all so tricky to assemble that Rifka had also built a computer controlled assembler just to put the machine together. She smiled a bit at them. She had scheduled herself to work on the device that evening, after dinner.

  The entire project made her feel excited. She hoped the implant device would, in a few months, install the optic and video co-processor implants that she custom designed to fit inside her eye-sockets. Nano-surgery to fix a broken bone was one thing, but this surgery suite would be on a whole new level.

  It had taken so long to get Erasmus to approve the project. Building the surgical equipment had been a relatively easy ask from her “parent.” But when she started designing the cybernetics, Erasmus had a lot more to say. Mostly, they had reasons why Rifka wasn’t old enough. Erasmus would have preferred for her to wait until she was twenty-six, but that seemed like a really long time when all the literature said her optic nerves would adapt better if she started younger. Eventually, Erasmus aided in her in the design instead.

  “I know you’re nearly ready.” Rifka told the parts. “You can wait a little bit though? I have to do the radio telescope first. And, then I have exercises.”

  Rifka undid the auto clasp on her coveralls. The synth muscles relaxed, allowing her to undo the mechanical connections and slip the coveralls off. She put them back in their charger next to her bed.

  “Technically, I ought to wear you all the time,” she told the auto coveralls. “But, as comfy as we made you, you still are a pain to wear to a bathroom.”

  She put on her regular miner’s glow-in-the-dark green coverall, and pulled on her metal-weave boots with the polymer soles. She wore this outfit most days, because she reasoned that it matched her hair, and the more protective suits were close at hand.

  After using the tiny bio waste disposal unit in her main room, and stowing the pan in the auto cleaner, Rifka went to her computer room to check the telescope that had caused her to set the chime in the first place.

  One day, Rifka planned to have a direct wire connection to her computer workstation. Then, she could dive into the computer system with a direct computer interface to her mind. But for now, she had to make do. She used her reclining metal swivel chair and to read the monitors, use the keyboard input devices, and—when necessary—use her virtual dive-suit.

  “How are you doing today computer?”

  “The system has no major faults, two minor lost packets in the diagnostic, and 15 empty I/O network connections,” the metallic voice interface answered. Rifka didn’t dare program an AI—especially with Erasmus around—but she reasoned that a voice interface reduced typing. Her custom systems didn’t require a GUI; she built them mostly on conversational models with some manual input.

  She sat in the chair, and a keyed in her new radio telescope’s imagining suite.

  “The drones should be in position. Computer, verify the the location data.”

  The computer displayed the relative coordinates to the monitors. Rifka read the positional data critically. She had worked out the locations herself, so the data seemed to put the drones within her hoped-for margins of error.

  “They look like they are in the right place.” Rifka said to herself. She started checking their readings against known measurements from the station’s older fixed array.

  The miniature orbiting drones Rifka had launched to make a new array were a type of radio telescope. They dynamically measured electromagnetic spectrum waves from stars millions of light years away, but if she wanted them to work together to create the highly detailed images that could find planets, they needed calibrating.

  “Computer, run the comparison and calibration program.” All she needed to do for calibration was to compare the new measurements these drones took during her sleep cycle with the older measurements from the surface radios. From that data, she could dial in the resolution with her custom-built software program and imaging suite. “Now then, let’s see if you have eyes to see the stars.” Rifka whispered.

  As Rifka retrieved the data, she started the tedious calibration, one setting at a time.

  Some hours later, the entire array mostly pointed in the direction Rifka wanted, except one drone refused to calibrate. Her schedule chimed. She was late, and the time allotment had blown past her scheduled breakfast, morning exercise routine, and seemed likely to keep her from her 5k run through the gravity enhanced portions of the station if she didn’t quit soon.

  “Array Drone 6, what is your problem?” Rifka muttered at the readout.

  Array Drone 6 had a blank section of data, but the system hadn’t switched off or given an error. It was if a shadow had passed between the little drone and the reference star. That should have been impossible. There weren’t any rocks or debris out there. Technically, Rifka could launch a new drone, or retrieve Drone 6 and repair it. But, she reasoned that the diagnostic came up clear; the drone worked. Except for a little more than a minute and a half roughly 3 hours ago while it took the readings for calibration.

  “You aren’t broken. And, if you’re not,” Rifka mused, “what other choices could cause this reading? There’s no reason for starship traffic to come from that direction, is there?”

  Starships did pass through the system. A few key presses later, Rifka had the video from the optical systems up to look at the space relatively close to LM-25. “Yup.” She nodded to herself. “Still mostly black. Still mostly empty.” She skipped backward through the video to see if anything obvious appeared. Nothing did.

  Determined, Rifka checked the optical system and passive surveillance receivers pointed at the nearest habitable ocean planet. It was little more than a blue dot in the inner system, and Erasmus called it “the Lake.” The humans called it something else, but Rifka never bothered with its proper name. LM-25 had been built over a hundred and fifty years before humans decided the little planet was worth their time. Now, it seemed to grow fish, kelp, and produced a distilled alcohol.

  From this distance, nothing unusual seemed to be happening on the video replay. The Lakelanders were, as usual, collecting the cylindrical-shaped containers that arrived from the wormhole. They drifted into the planet’s gravity well right on schedule, and the people gathered them up before they started to fall into the atmosphere and burn up.

  According to what Rifka and Erasmus had figured out from decrypted communications, humans designed the cylinders to be repacked with the ocean planet’s products. After, the Lakelanders lashed the cylinders to the big automated tug ships that took them back through the wormhole several times in an annual cycle. Instead of shipping them back, the people on the other side shoved the cylinders through and they would drift back to the little blue planet. Mostly.

  Occasionally, a cylinder from the wormhole would drift off course enough to be caught in LM-25’s orbit instead of heading to the inner system and the Lake. But, the Lakelanders never dared to come near the Lonely Mountain to retrieve their cargo cylinders.

  Today all of the system traffic was almost normal.

  “What is that?” At nearly the same time her drone had its blank spot, something hailed the planet, and not on the usual schedule at all. “Something else came in through the wormhole?” Rifka said to herself. “It stopped short, so no wonder it blocked my little array drone. I didn’t think that was possible. That also looks like a new ship, and not the usual sort of deep space cargo vessel they normally get over at the Lake either.”

  Rifka loaded the ship data into a search file and sent it to the search algorithm and monitoring data collection suite. She could ask Erasmus, but she didn’t because she didn’t want to alarm them. Erasmus may sleep all day, but they never stopped watching for thieves, pirates, and armed spacecraft. They also had their own surveillance systems that Rifka couldn’t access.

  The new spaceship encrypted its transmissions, so Rifka set her cracker program to get to work on decryption.

  She also checked the math on the mystery ship’s entry path, and that little ship had gotten between her reference star and Drone 6. In space, this was a billion chances to one, and even more unlikely when Rifka had chosen this star because it wasn’t the normal traffic route to the Lake at all.

  “See there? It’s not your fault,” Rifka told her drone.

  “Now, what could you be?” Rifka said to the new vessel on her computer screen. Her curiosity enflamed, Rifka turned her new radio telescope (minus one uncalibrated drone) toward the colony to see if she could find the current location of the unusual new ship. Hardly anything was invisible to electromagnetic radiation.