Chapter No.5.

After several hours Chara returned and found Ryan unconscious. She realized that he was in danger of ceasing life function. His head was bent down with his chin resting on his chest, and he was barely breathing. She used a reprogrammed remote to lower him to the floor and then remove the manacles from his wrists. She carried him to his quarters and put him in his bunk. At this point she realized that she had made a serious mistake. If he died, she would be left alone. Even though she could compete her mission to get to Planet Nine alone, she would have no one to appreciate her achievement, but she realized that it would also have a detrimental effect on her operation, one that could cause a failure of her computing systems.

She consulted the human medical manual on a computer monitor and soon found that he required a stimulus injection. She went to the medical module in the passageway and obtained the needed stimulus and returned to his room. He was barely alive. She quickly injected the stimulus directly into an artery and waited to see if it worked.

His eyelids quivered briefly and then opened. Ryan blinked several times before he looked up at her. Tears gradually leaked down to his chin, and he sighed. "Why didn't you end my miserable life?" he said in a broken voice.

"I am not permitted to take the life of a human, according to the Universal Artificial Life Directive."

He just stared at her, blinking several times, before he replied. "I'm thirsty. Could you please give me something to drink?"

Chara obtained a metal cup, filled it with water, and handed it to him. He took it and drank all of it before coughing. "Thanks."

"I will give you something to eat," she told him before leaving his room.

Ryan didn't know why she suddenly changed her tune and was concerned about him. He didn't believe that she was worried about the UALD rule for artificial life forms. Did she have a conscience? He doubted that. It had to be something in her programming that had suddenly changed.

She returned with a plate containing an artificial burger and cauliflower. He sat up in the bunk and went to work wolfing it down.

"Thanks. I needed that."

"Can you walk?" she asked him.

"I don't know. My balls are swollen and hurt like hell from you poking them with your pain stick."

"I'm sorry," she replied. "I didn't think that you would need your sexual organs any time soon."

That made him give her a few constrained laughs. "That's for sure." His expression turned to a more serious mode. "It would help if I had some clothes."

"You don't need to wear clothes."

"Why do you keep saying that I don't need clothing? You wear clothes."

"I am required to wear a uniform to cover the robotic appearance of my body."

"That's ridiculous. Everyone knows what you are."

"Everyone knows what you look like without clothing."

"I could argue that, but it doesn't matter. We're stuck with each other, and we may as well get used to it."

"I concur with that expression of reconciliation."

Ryan realized that she had changed because of him, and he could say the same thing about himself.

The next day he sat next to her at the command center. "Any signs of trouble?"

"I am not using active scanning because it could be detected. Passive scanning has not revealed any other vessels within a hundred million kilometers."

"Hopefully it will remain that way," Ryan said after a sigh.

He remined silent for several minutes before returning to their running argument. "You claim that you wear clothing to hide the robotic appearance of your body, but you're a model A-16K and have the advanced silicone composite-based flesh. It's so close to human skin it's almost impossible to discern that it's artificial."

She stared at him for a moment before replying. "How do you know what model I am?"

"I was an artificial life engineer before joining Space Command. I worked on the development of your model."

Chara seemed to be confused for a few seconds. Her eyes swiveled around randomly before being aimed directly at Ryan. "You are my father."

Ryan laughed. "I've been called lots of things, but not that."

Chara remained quiet and kept her gaze on the ship's engineering readouts. She exhibited no signs of being confused or disturbed.

Ryan decided to begin a new argument. "I was wondering about how you determined that there is an Earth-like planet in the same orbit as Earth."

"My method started with solving the n-body choreography problem and then creating a precise numerical model of the Solar System. That's when I discovered a discrepancy. Without a ninth planet, the system broke down over a billion years."

"I thought that two planets in the same orbit would eventually collide."

"That's true, but there is a tenth planet that stabilizes that configuration."

"What sort of planet is this ninth planet?"

She blinked a few times before replying. "I believe it would be a planet exactly the same mass and size as Earth with three moons that equal to the mass of Earth's moon."

"I find it hard to believe that it hasn't been discovered. Something like that should have been discovered a century ago."

"It was not discovered because it was thought to be impossible."

Ryan chuckled. "I could imagine that." He looked away for several minutes before turning to her with a concerned expression. "I notice that you have a pain stick attached to your belt. Are you planning on using that on me?"

"I think you need to be punished occasionally."

"Why?"

"Because you are human and unpredictable."

Ryan wasn't sure how to reply to that. He realized that he was at the mercy of a machine that considered him to be the enemy, even though he wasn't.