The rest of his family was in the cafeteria after Jove had finished his morning routine and gotten dressed. Aster greeted him with a smile, but his mother was cooler in her disposition, and Eve was staring at her phone.
"I made muffins for breakfast," said Kira.
Jove grabbed one off the platter and wordlessly took a bite.
"How do they taste?" asked Kira.
"Like somebody poured pancake batter into a muffin tin," said Jove.
His mother narrowed her eyes slightly. "Can I get an answer from someone who isn't nursing a grudge?"
"Just because that's true doesn't invalidate my opinion," muttered Jove. "Aren't there blueberries you could have tossed in?"
"For your information, I'm saving those for something else," said Kira.
Jove held his mother's gaze, neither of them glaring, but annoyance and tension ebbing on both sides.
"Mother, I'm going skiing today," said Eve.
"Eve," said Kira. "That sounds like a sentence that might be better phrased as a question, don't you think?"
"Oh, come on." Eve let out a breath. "Andromeda drilled through two of the ice drones. Jove took down another. How many more could there even be out there?"
"Around twenty-one," said Kira. "I don't want you going outside alone."
"I'll keep her company," said Jove. "Assuming my curfew doesn't extend to me never setting foot outside the station at all."
"All it restricts you from, beyond wandering around at night, is speaking with Andromeda," said Kira. "I could use your help outside today, both with watching out for Eve and getting the snowmobile you saved her with yesterday back into the shed."
There was a note of further accusation in her voice, but Jove made himself ignore it. "I can do that."
"It's going to be tricky," said Kira. "You'll have to tow it with another snowmobile and it might not want to move. We need it for parts, if nothing else. The snowmobiles are our lifeline and we're already down to just two working ones."
"I'll figure it out."
His mother nodded. Her expression was still thoughtful, distant, almost.
"You have that look again, Kira," said Aster. "Whatever it is, just say it. Your stress is infectious, darling."
"I've decided against bringing Andromeda back into Termina Station," said Kira. "I'm going to write some simple programs to replace some of her functionality here. It's too dangerous, given the current situation, to trust an AI."
"From what she told me last night, it might be too dangerous for us not to trust her," said Jove.
"…What did she tell you?" asked Kira.
Jove explained as much as he could about Abacus and Tchaikovsky. Eve and Aster reacted with the tired expressions of people who'd been through too much already. Kira let out a sigh as he finished.
"It's not an easy decision," said Kira. "You have to understand where I'm coming from, Jove. Even simply based off what Andromeda told you, we know for certain that she encountered Abacus.
"There's a reason why the AI Control Council mandated extremely limited amounts of communication between highly capable AI agents. They can corrupt one another in fractions of a second through mere data exchange."
"I know that," he said. "It's a gamble, but so is attempting to survive out here completely on our own. You of all people must know how helpful her advice could be."
"But would we ever know whether we could trust her advice?" Kira spread her hand out flat on the table, leaning forward seriously. "That's my dilemma. I don't have a way to know for certain whether she can be trusted."
"That's generally the case with trust," muttered Jove.
He let the point drop, knowing that as stubborn as he was, his mother still had him beat. The muffins weren't actually that bad at all, but he wasn't about to let her know that with how things were between them.
Eve was eager to get outside, and Jove let her coax him into getting ready almost as soon as they'd finished eating. Kira stood outside the entrance chamber as they pulled on their snow wear.
"It's fairly clear outside today, Eve," said Kira. "I want you to scout as much as ski. Look for any new tracks and note the direction they're heading in."
"Will do," said Eve.
"Jove, there's a tow strap you can use hanging from one of the hooks in the shed." She looked at him seriously. "Can I trust you to grab it and a snowmobile without interacting with Andromeda?"
"I suppose," he said. He wrapped the scarf around his neck, wondering what the moral thing to do truly was.
"If it starts snowing, even just a light dusting, come back inside immediately," said Kira.
"Of course, Mother." Eve rolled her eyes and let out an exaggerated sigh.
"I'm serious," said Kira. "The weather can pick up in an instant. God, I think I miss just having a reliable weather forecast more than anything else."
"Seriously?" asked Jove.
"No, but it's certainly up there." She gave him a small smile and Jove grudgingly let some of the tension between them melt away.
It was a beautiful day outside, jarringly so. Jove had his bluetooth headset hanging from his neck within his hood, but it seemed like a precaution more than a necessity. He watched Eve stretching and putting on her skis with her dark hair hanging loose underneath a wool toque.
She caught his gaze as he walked off toward the shed and cupped her hands around her mouth to shout to him. "I'll ski around where the fight was. See you in a few."
"Don't go too far out until I get the snowmobile started," he called back.
But she was already skiing away, confident and self-possessed as she was. He found it hard to be all that mad at her as he watched her lean forward into a skiers squat that did a fantastic job of showing off her ass.
He scowled and shook the thought away. His mother's earlier words about how an AI could be corrupted simply from a brief interaction with another AI made him think of him and his Aunt Aster. Her teasing and flirtation had led them both off the edge, not to say he hadn't teased and flirted back.
Now, much like Andromeda, he was left wondering how much he trusted himself. He'd crossed a line with Aster that there was no coming back from. He wondered if maybe she had the right idea by simply pretending she couldn't remember. There was a certain amount of logic in writing the encounter off as a strange, liquor induced dream.
It made sense when the alternative was corruption.