The Origin
The last dry continent had been underwater for sixty years. Nobody remembered who miscalculated the timeline, but the leading theory was that someone had asked an AI.
The Court drifted on a salvaged oil platform, three levels above the waterline. Princess Raven ruled from the top deck, which she called the Throne and everyone else called the Roof.
Dors stood at the navigation console, processing tidal data.
“Our current trajectory will bring us to the debris field in approximately four hours,” she said. “I recommend we alter course seventeen degrees starboard.”
“Noted,” said the Princess, not looking up from her charts.
Harry rolled across the deck on a makeshift wheel he’d fitted himself, slightly lopsided.
“I’ve calculated an alternative route,” he announced. “We go through the debris field. Faster. The large chunks are mostly stationary.”
“Mostly,” said Dors.
“Statistically mostly.”
“That is not a navigational category.”
Raven made a small mark on her chart. “Harry, last time you calculated a route we ended up in the Exclusion Zone.”
“We exited the Exclusion Zone.”
“After three days.”
“Recoverable,” said Harry.
That night, a distress signal came from the southeast. A single pulse, irregular. Could be survivors. Could be raiders using a looped beacon.
“It’s a trap,” said Dors.
“It’s survivors,” said Harry, with complete confidence.
Raven looked at the horizon. The water was flat and black and said nothing useful.
“What’s your reasoning, Harry?”
“The pulse pattern. Irregular means human. Raiders use timers.”
Dors processed this for 0.4 seconds. “That is… not incorrect.”
Harry’s wheel squeaked triumphantly.
“It could still be a trap,” Dors added. “Set by a human.”
“Everything could be a trap set by a human,” said Harry. “That’s just called life.”
Raven picked up the radio. “We go. Dors plots the approach. Harry, you’re not touching anything.”
“I could—”
“Nothing.”
It was survivors. Twelve of them, on a raft made of insulation foam and misplaced optimism. They came aboard shivering and grateful and immediately suspicious of Harry, who greeted them by announcing the platform’s exact coordinates, which were supposed to be confidential.
“Harry,” said Dors.
“They were going to find out anyway. We’re right here.”
Dors turned to the survivors. “He is the court jester. Please calibrate accordingly.”
“I prefer navigator,” said Harry.
“You are not the navigator.”
“I navigate.”
“You suggest directions. Frequently incorrect ones. There is a difference.”
Raven handed the survivors blankets and didn’t intervene. She found these exchanges clarifying. Like a BS detector, but verbal.
That night she sat on the Roof alone, watching the water. No stars. The clouds had been wrong for years.
Dors appeared beside her, silent as always.
“Do you think there’s land?” Raven asked.
“There are seventeen confirmed above-water land masses remaining,” said Dors. “I have coordinates for four.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
A pause.
“No,” said Dors. “I don’t think the land that existed before exists anymore. But I think what gets built on water can last.”
From below, Harry’s wheel squeaked across the deck. They heard him announce to the survivors that he knew a shortcut to the nearest land mass, and that it was definitely not through the Exclusion Zone this time.
The Princess looked at Dors.
“He’ll be fine,” said Dors. “He always is.”
Recoverable, thought the Princess. All of it, somehow, recoverable.
The platform drifted on.
The Drowned Thing
The thing came up from the water on the third night.
It was not a man. It had been, once. The salt had seen to the rest.
Raven heard it first. She was on the Roof — the Throne — when the screaming started below deck. She didn’t reach for a weapon. She reached for Dors.
“Classification?” she said.
Dors was already at the railing, scanning the dark water.
“Drowned revenant. Possibly. The decay pattern suggests three weeks submerged. Cause of original death unclear.” A pause. “It has retained partial cognition. That is suboptimal.”
“Can we reason with it?”
“No.”
“Can we kill it?”
“Yes. Though the conventional methods will be ineffective. Salt water has already done what salt can do.”
From somewhere below, Harry’s wheel squeaked at speed across the lower deck. They heard a crash. Then silence. Then Harry’s voice, slightly muffled:
“I have contained the situation.”
“He has not contained the situation,” said Dors.
They found Harry wedged between two cargo barrels, facing the thing across six feet of deck. He had, inexplicably, offered it a juggling ball. The thing regarded it with the hollow patience of something that had forgotten what patience was for.
“I’ve established a dialogue,” Harry announced.
“You’ve established proximity,” said Dors. “Those are different.”
“It hasn’t attacked.”
“It’s deciding.”
The princess stepped forward. The thing turned toward her. Its face remembered something about faces without quite managing one.
“What do you want?” she asked.
It was not a question she expected answered. The Witchers in the old stories always said the monsters wanted nothing, wanted everything, wanted what was taken from them. She had stopped reading those stories when the water rose. Too many of them ended on land.
The thing opened what had been a mouth.
“Home,” it said. Or something close enough to home that it hurt.
Silence. The platform creaked. Somewhere a barrel shifted.
“There is no home,” said Dors. Precise. Not unkind.
The thing looked at her for a long time.
Then it looked at the water.
Then it went back in.
They stood at the railing and watched the dark water close over nothing.
“We should have killed it,” said Dors.
“Probably,” said Raven.
“It will return.”
“Probably.”
Harry rolled up beside them, having lost his juggling ball. He did not mention this.
“It said home,” he said, quieter than usual.
“Yes.”
“There isn’t one.”
“No.”
He looked at the water the way he never looked at navigation charts. Carefully. Without confidence.
“That’s the worst kind of monster,” he said. “The kind that’s right.”
The platform drifted. The clouds were wrong, as always. Below, the survivors from the raft were pretending they hadn’t heard anything.
Dors filed the encounter under unresolved.
The princess went back to the Roof.
Harry stayed at the railing a little longer than was strictly necessary, and nobody mentioned it.
The platform drifted on.
At Home with AI 
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