Binary System

Hartenbaum, Kayo. "Binary System." The Last Dangerous Visions. Harlan Ellison, credited editor, with J. Michael Straczynski. Ashland, OR: Blackstone, 2024.[1]

The protagonist-Narrator — the only real character in the story — is a cyborg, minimally-modified in most ways, but with an AI at the core of her brain and possibly her being. She is a lightship keeper, living in isolation from other people, in a ship containing a garden. The Keeper can't afford the medical work for unlimited life but has a lesser "conditional immortality" in that she dies in her line of work but is brought back, rebooted. The Keeper and her AI monitor can engage in a variety of dialog, and do.

For the Garden in the ship, note A. C. Clarke and Gentry Lee's The Garden of Rama and the title of Leo Marx's important nonfiction discussion, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America and the variation on the title in Karen Blair's "The Garden in the Machine: The Why of Star Trek. For a sustained consideration of plants in space, potentially enclosed in mechanism, note such works at the 1972 film SILENT RUNNING.[2]

RDE, finishing, 9Feb25