“Please report to the medical bay, Ms Kereama.”

My head snapped up and glared at the rounded ceiling where the disembodied voice seemed to have come from.

I made a grunting sound and returned my attention to my elderly aunt’s arm. When the ship launched, we’d both been sitting on our beds. But no one had explained to us that lift-off would be so violent. Aunt Mara had been thrown to the floor and now had a scrape down the length of her right forearm.

Thankfully, every cabin on board the vessel had been given rudimentary medical supplies; I’d found ours in the minuscule ensuite bathroom we shared, and I was now wrapping up her brittle, paper thin skin in a crepe bandage. Maybe the speaker in the ceiling wanted me to take Aunt Mara to the medbay?

“Please report to the medical bay, Ms Kereama. Your assistance is required immediately.”

“Is that thing talking to you, Ana?” my aunt asked.

“Damned if I know, Auntie.”

“Hush now. No swearing. It might be listening.”

“Who...?”

“I am listening,” the speaker in the ceiling announced. “I am also concurrently carrying out twenty-two conversations throughout the ship and running forty-four systems checks simultaneously.”

“Overachiever much?” I muttered. Then leaned forward to whisper to my aunt, “Is it the ship purser?” But that didn’t make sense. Why would the ship purser be carrying out systems checks?

Aunt Mara chuckled. “It’s the AI that runs the ship, aroha. Pavo they call it.”

“Like the ship’s name?”

“I guess it’s named after it.”

I shook my head as I finished up with Aunt Mara’s arm. She’d be bruised, but nothing was broken. I looked up into her withered face and wondered again how she’d last on this journey. Ten years ago, flight through space had been in the realm of science fiction only. A dream we’d all harboured as we’d faced our planet’s end. Then out of nowhere, private companies like Virgin Galactic suddenly announced they’d mastered interstellar flight capabilities. A Hail Mary at the ninth hour.

We’d celebrated for weeks until they’d all, one by one, explained to a desperate humanity, that seats were numbered and only those rich enough to afford a berth could expect salvation.

I’d accepted the inevitable. Spent my fair share of time sprawled drunkenly under the bar at my nearest watering hole along with hundreds of others in my neighbourhood. Then ten days out from Pavo’s launch window, my aunt turned up at my door.

“Please report to the medical bay, Ms Kereama. Doctor Medina is expecting you.”

“It really is speaking to me, isn’t it?” I said.

“I think so,” my aunt agreed.

“But why the medbay?”

“We always knew you’d have to work for your passage, Ana. Why not the medbay?”

My aunt had been granted free passage for sentimentality reasons. I’m sure, otherwise, she would not have met the criteria for boarding. She was old. In her seventies. Hardly a fitting example of what would be needed to rebuild humanity. But she’d been the favourite nanny of the man who had leased this vessel. And what Mr Archibald wanted, Mr Archibald got.

I could hardly complain. I was her chosen companion. Her plus one. I wasn’t lying passed out under The Jolly Roger’s bar along with the rest of my friends. But I hadn’t been entirely honest when I’d filled out my bio for the flight; a requirement that had gone into sufficient detail to let me know acceptance on board would be subject to certain genetic triggers and not my preferred position as my aunt’s favourite niece.

“How does it know?” I whispered.

“Know what?” my aunt said in normal volume.

“I am aware of your previous experience as a Royal New Zealand Army medic,” the AI said.

I bit my lip and stared at the gel-coated floor. This was not good. Not good at all.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “You’ve made a mistake.”

“I do not make mistakes. And your assistance is required. Please follow the blue arrows to the medical bay.”

A pulsing blue light appeared beneath my feet and then started to form an arrow heading toward the door of our cabin. I jumped back as if avoiding standing on the freaky illumination would somehow make this all go away.

“Ana,” my aunt said firmly. Her nanny voice. “You must help. This is how you will pay your way.”

“I thought maybe the kitchens,” I muttered to myself. Not the medbay. Never the medbay.

“What is wrong?” Aunt Mara asked. “You were a good paramedic.”

Until I wasn’t.

I shook my head, my eyes threatening to tear up, my hands wringing.

“Aroha,” my aunt whispered, pulling herself up from the bed and gripping my hands in her gnarled ones. “You can do this. You must.”

I looked into old eyes; eyes that had seen so much of our world. Had seen the good and the bad and the oncoming end. Aunt Mara never questioned her good fortune on gaining a berth on board Pavo. She’d simply turned up on my doorstep and told me to pack. Of all the relatives in our whanau, she’d picked me.

“Why me, Auntie?” I asked.

She didn’t pretend not to understand. She squeezed my hands and simply said, “Because I knew you could do it. That you would do it. That failure was not an option.”

I shook my head. She didn’t know me. She didn’t know what I’d done. How coming back from that was an impossibility. The disappointment that my favourite auntie did not know the real me left me feeling bereft. The knowledge that she wasn’t aware of what had happened made it possible to breathe.

“Because,” Aunt Mara added, “you deserve a second chance.”

I stopped breathing. She looked me straight in the eyes and held my unblinking stare.

“You told them,” I accused. She had known. Of course, she’d known. Aunt Mara knew everything that happened to anyone in the family.

“No, aroha,” she said. “I had hoped you would.”

I shook my head.

“Please report to the medical bay, Ms Kereama. There are exactly twenty-three passengers from Habitat Two in need of medical aid. Doctor Medina requires your assistance.”

“There has to be someone else. A nurse maybe.”

“There is no one on board within the pay-for-passage class with your medical expertise.”

I laughed. It was bordering on hysterical.

“I did not make a joke,” the AI announced in its robotic monotone.

I laughed a little harder, muttering, “And in the paid-up class?”

“That would be inappropriate.”

“You mean none of the lawyers and celebrities and crooked real estate magnates want to get their hands bloody?”

There was a lengthy pause, and then the AI said, “Yes.”

I looked at my aunt. She shrugged her shoulders. The blue arrow on the ground flashed a little faster.

I wasn’t sure I could do this. Could face this all over again.

“Twenty-three passengers today,” the AI said as if it could read the uncertainty in my facial features. “Who knows how many tomorrow, Ms Kereama.”

“You just had to go and hit all the guilt buttons, didn’t you?”

“I did not hit any buttons. But I am currently carrying out nineteen systems checks, and they do require buttons of a sort to be pushed.”

I stared at the gel-coated ceiling and smiled. An AI with a sense of humour. Who’d have thunk it?

“I think I might like you, AI,” I said.

“My name is Pavo,” it replied. “Are you ready to follow the arrows now?”

Was I? No fucking way.

Would I? Of course, I would.

Failure was not an option.

Not anymore, anyway.