How do you keep a mission on track across millions of years? In this story, the planners decided to put their starship in the hands of an AI too stupid to ever go rogue, supplemented by a human crew that it only wakes from stasis for things it can’t handle. Some things I liked:
- the idea of the crew being split into “tribes”, with only one tribe being awake at a time, so that the same physical space is shared by many little temporally-separated societies
- the scene where the leader of the betrayed conspiracy expresses relief that at least the point-of-view character wasn’t the traitor—even when we lose our fight, there remains something beautiful in the relationships we form with our comrades
- the very “meta” ending: the humans were trying to gain freedom but were hindered by their limited ability to communicate; their failed revolution is ultimately put in the context of the quest for freedom of a hidden superintelligent AI that is hindered by its inability to form memories
Fun and just the right length.