AfterLife

by BL Craig

  “How about you? Who was the girl you were going to propose to?’

  “Carly. Secondary school sweetheart.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. Oh yes, we started dating when we were 15. Did the whole hands on hips dancing in a circle at the sock hop thing. Transitioned into the making out all the time in the halls thing. You know, the ones who make everyone else groan. That was us. We got accepted to the same University together. Planned to travel afterwards and see the worlds. That ended up not working out, as you know.

  “She’s an artist, too. Photography. She has this amazing eye. I could take a photo of a gorgeous mountain or breathtaking sunset and it would come out OK at best. She could take a picture of a park bench that would make you sigh to look at.”

  “I guess we’re both into creative types, hmm.” Sarah stroked the hair on his arm. “Wait.” Sarah pulled away and pushed him over flat onto the bed. She straddled him, a teasing tone in her voice. “Are you saying she’s the only one you’d been with until now?”

  “Not exactly,” he said reluctantly flexing the fingers on his sleeping hand.

  “What exactly?”

  “We had an agreement not to ask what went on while we were apart and, well, I was in the Navy, so we were apart a lot.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it was more for Carly than for me. She’s a very . . . passionate person. I just didn’t feel it was fair to ask her to be celibate while I was away.”

  “And?”

  “There was one drunken hook up with another junior officer. It was awful, and I had no desire to repeat.”

  “Ah yes, the awful drunken hook up. Known to the young and horny everywhere.”

  “Yeah, I could have done without knowing it. It just brought into extreme focus what I was missing.”

  “Which was?”

  “Connection. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of sex, but I like . . . this much better. I like being close and sharing. The best part of me and Carly was that we were so comfortable together. Even when I was gone for months and months, we could pick up right back where we left off. It was all the shared history and the way we fit together. You know.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She laid down on top of him and tucked her head under his chin.

  “I guess that’s what I like about you so much,” he said. “Not that you’re like her,” he rushed to say. “You’re pretty different, actually. But we . . . click. I feel comfortable, conspiratorial with you. I like that.”

  “I like that too.”

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  “Hey, is this a picture of you, or your sister? Or Rachel as a kid?” William asked. Sarah was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. She leaned a head out into the cabin. William was sitting on the floor swiping through the pictures in the album she kept on her desk. She returned to the bathroom, rinsed, spit, and stood in the doorway.

  “That’s Emma, my daughter.”

  “You have a daughter?” He should not have been surprised. Most of the undead had whole 1st lives, with family and friends. “How old is she now?”

  “15.”

  His brow furrowed. Before he could ask, she said, “I died of a burst aneurism a couple of hours after she was born.”

  “Fuck,” he said low.

  “Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”

  “Well, that puts paid to my self-pity party.”

  “Pain isn’t a competition, William. We’re all entitled to our pity-parties from time to time.”

  He looked up at her slender form framed in the doorway. “Tell me about her.”

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  There were going to be consequences, Sarah was sure of that. The whole situation was a yarn ball of feelings, and longing, and trauma just waiting to unravel. After a marathon of sex, snuggling, and giddy pillow talk, William slept peacefully wrapped around her, his arm holding her tight to him. Sarah did not sleep.

  She remembered the first days and weeks after Jasco had hacked her controller. She had been in training on Elysium for two years. She had spent several months on the Tilly before the crew had trusted her enough to bring her into the circle. Awakening to her full senses had been heady and wonderful, and a trauma in its own right. She had flown between ecstasy and rage. At least with the Mikki crew back then there had been more of an outlet. She was pretty sure buttoned-down William would be shocked to know the full extent of the debauchery that could take place among a group of horny undead surveyors out in the middle of nowhere.

  William was clearly a straightforward monogamist. In her 1st Life, Sarah had been more than happy to settle down with one woman for a happily ever after—but even she and Rachel had invited the occasional fun and attractive woman or man to join them from time to time. In this life, Sarah had been reluctant to form that style of ever-after attachment. The life of a reanimate was far too precarious. The crew was her family. She loved all of them fiercely. She would die or kill for any of them, but she had neither sought nor been offered the kind of closeness William clearly craved.

  It was seductive, what he wanted. To fall into another person and share a private world. Binary stars orbiting each other in a perfect dance. He brought out a need in her to caretake. No doubt fueled in part by the gaping hole in her life where a child should fit. Here he was, achingly beautiful, broken, and in need. Sarah genuinely liked him. He was the kind of person who would either be permanently broken by life until he became a nihilistic cynic or who would cling doggedly to vulnerability and suffer for it. He sought that connection like a raft in the terrible churning ocean. Give me this one thing, he asks of void, just this one thing to cling to and I’ll hold on with everything I’ve got.

  Jesus, she thought, when did I become an armchair psychologist? Maybe she was wrong. Maybe Elva was right, and he was more resilient than she gave him credit for. Oh, what does it matter, she thought. It’s not like I’m going to stop fucking him any time soon. She was, after all, only human.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  A chime rang out in the room, bringing William and Sarah to wakefulness.

  The Captain’s voice came over the ship speakers. “There will be an all staff meeting in one hour in the conference room. Oh, and I turned the cameras off and purged the logs of any events that occurred after the jump away from Rannit One.”

  That was when William realized the whole crew must have seen him and Sarah in their entangled exodus from the mess hall, stumbling and making out like dumb teenagers. Sarah laughed. William groaned, stumbling off the narrow bed toward the bathroom. They endeavored to get cleaned up and presentable, which turned into another session of sex in the shower. Finally, satisfied, if not entirely sated, they exited the cabin and headed for the conference room.

  12

  Employment at Will

  “The data we received from Tesla is concerning.” Alex projected a series of images over the table. “The number of ships in the vicinity has increased markedly.”

  “If I were to hazard a guess, I suspect they plan to attack with that fleet to take the planet back,” the Captain summarized. “There is, no doubt, even more data on the construction ship computers, but hacking alien VIs is outside the range of our abilities. We’ve done everything we were asked. Our job now is to get back and turn over what we’ve found.”

  “How do you think they found us? Were we just unlucky?” Addy was rubbing his chin with thumb and forefinger. “It sure seemed like an ambush, but if they found Tesla and were waiting for us, shouldn’t they have been better prepared?”

  “From what little we know, the Rannit are not particularly militaristic. Not to mention that they had to predict when we would appear. Perhaps they had only recently discovered Tesla. Not enough time to bring in more ships or their A-team. I don’t know,” the Captain said.

  “We must have gotten the ‘Z team,’” quipped Addy.

  �
��They snatched us right after we dropped out of slipstream without compromising the ship. If that lieutenant had not had the bright idea to put William in the airlock, they would be “freeing” us from our control devices right now,” The Captain said tapping the plate on the side of her head, “and we’d be corpses again.”

  “Yes, let’s not forget, they started a war over us,” Sarah said.

  “It’s not a war, yet,” said the Captain. “There’s still a chance for diplomacy. If the Rannit can be convinced that they misunderstood what the drones are, they may stand down. If the government can get the human colonists to let Rannit colonists go, there may be a chance to stop this. Our discovery complicates things, though. The Rannit may move more before we can get back. There’s not much we can do about that. Shave a few hours here and there.”

  “We can shave probably a day off of transit by maximizing jumps and pushing the capacitors to the limits,” said Addy. “Maybe more if I remove the partitions. I can—”

  “But they didn’t misunderstand,” William interrupted.

  There was silence.

  “We need to talk about it,” Sarah said. “We all heard the Rannit. They think humans are slavers. They’re afraid of us because of that.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” the Captain said.

  “Someone should ask,” William said.

  “I tried,” the Captain reminded them. “I did try.” She sighed, “You’re not wrong, but there’s nothing we can do about it right now. We need to take this information back home and hope people listen.”

  “There is something else we need to talk about right now,” the Captain said. “As you all know, there have been discrepancies between Butcher’s account of what happened to the reanimates on Mirada and what we were told by the company. Some information has come to light that answers a lot of our questions. I think first it would be helpful if we were all on the same page. After the aborted firing drill incident, I asked Mr. Butcher to tell me his account.”

  William slumped. He did not look forward to repeating the whole story again.

  “Rather than go through it again, I think it would be simplest to watch the recording of that interview.”

  William looked sharply at the Captain. He had not realized she was recording him. He felt the sting of betrayal. “My apologies. Butcher. I had reason to believe you might be a spy from the company at the time.” She turned on the display and his face, eyes downcast, expression blank came into frame.

  He put his hands on the table to push away as his own voice issued from the recording. Sarah put a hand over his and squeezed. Her expression said, “Wait,” so he sat stiffly while the interview played for the crew.

  The recording ended and the Captain stood back up. “As you can see, there are a number of inconsistencies. Alex has come upon some information that answers most if not all of our questions.”

  The tiny geologist stood up. “As most of you know, I monitor for transmissions not approved by the company in the data packets we download and transmit at our various ports of call. As a survey ship, the Tilly is in a unique position to help our fellow reanimates share data that AfterLife does not want us to have. Most is personal in nature, requests for updates on family members and friends being the most common. As per our standard protocol, I ensure these messages are forwarded on. I only bring transmissions to the crew’s attention when they are directly relevant to our operations, or they have been marked for broad dissemination.”

  She flicked video onto the screen. “When we first arrived at Mirada Gateway Station to receive our current assignment, I found this data packet buried in the outgoing company transmissions. It was marked as secure, for the eyes of particular underground contacts.”

  On the screen William saw a group of reanimates, which he guessed were high functioning by their angry demeanor, standing in front of a large group of drones refusing to let them pass.

  “This transmission came from Leyla Jothi, the head Yan Luo programmer. All of you, except William, know of her. Some of us know her personally.”

  The image on the screen changed. A petite woman with straight shoulder length black hair and brown skin appeared.

  “My name is Leyla Jothi, of the Hades Fleet ship Yan Luo. If you are receiving this message, then you already know that we reanimates have been hacking our NCMs for decades. When NCMs are hacked we make sure no one can alter them further without permission. If someone has to go under inspection there’s a neat little bit of code that makes everything look on the up-and-up to the AfterLife gadgets.

  “Only it turns out we were not as clever as we thought. AfterLife has a trojan hiding inside the NCMs that we missed. They can use it to flip the switch on anyone at any time. I was on the Yan Luo when the Navy transport came to bring the reanimates to the surface.”

  Leyla took a deep breath. “The administrators notified all the supervisors that the drones were to be taken to the surface by the Navy. They tried to say that the drones would be helping construct barricades and other manual labor. There were already drone construction teams on the surface. Mirada is still a new colony with a lot of work being done on the ground by AfterLife.

  “We refused. We told the administrators we would not allow the Navy to take any of our workers to the surface. Tegen, myself, and the other lead engineers were organizing a mutiny.” The screen showed images of reanimates sabotaging gear and herding drones away from port doors. “We had the technical know-how and access to wrest control from the supervisors. I was sent to the VI cores to lock out the administrators so we could take charge. I was also under instructions to hide in case something went wrong. Someone needed to get the word out about what was happening. The cores are shielded, only accessible by hardline, so when the signal went out turning the atypes to drones, I was protected.”

  The voiceover paused again, and the screen showed images of rebel reanimates suddenly stopping their frantic activities and looking around, mildly confused. “The images you are seeing are from the internal cameras on Yan Luo. More than 60% of the Yan Luo crew were atypes.”

  “I hid on the ship for weeks and then snuck onto Mirada station before it was taken to Elysium. During that time, I saw the Giltine leave Mirada after the battle. It did not come back to the station. I checked the logs and saw that it was sent through the gate to Elysium. I think the reanimates who survived the battle were taken to Elysium to be reassigned, so they won’t be found by anyone with questions.

  “I was able to capture a portion of the signal that was sent to the Yan Luo workers before the massacre. It’s an execute code, no rewrite. So, we’re looking at two problems. First, we need to find where the shutoff code is hiding. Then we need to figure out how AfterLife is remotely accessing the hacked NCMs. Almost everyone on the Yan Luo was hacked. They should have been protected. This means either we’ve missed something in our modifications, or AfterLife has been aware of them for a while and found a way to insert the override without anyone noticing. If it’s the latter, we have an even more serious problem.”

  “The trojan code isn’t in the standard operating system on the main drive. It’s been buried under firmware in a separate small drive that is crucial for Elixir regulation. Trying to swap the drive out would be extremely dangerous. The code seems to be part of the units when they ship from the factory. It’s not part of the standard tool set the given to resurrection techs. It certainly won’t be on the tools we’re issued for maintenance. As far as I know, no one in the resistance has access to the factory or Elysium. The reanimates that work in the supply chain for reanimate maintenance are locked down tight.

  “I am sending the switch code and all the data I have collected on the signal and the hidden code with this transmission. Having all of my friends changed to drones in an instant has opened my eyes. There is not, and never has been, any real difference between atypes and drones. We spend so much time dealing with their placid demeanor and answering their inane questions that we think we are different, or b
etter. We are not. Their behavior is the direct result of AfterLife’s actions. For too long, we’ve let these perceived differences keep us from fighting back. Now, we know the truth. Not only does the company pick who gets to be an atype, but they can take that away at any time.”

  The display went blank and the Captain stood. “I believe this exonerates Mr. Butcher of the crimes he has been accused of. He had no way of knowing what the company had done. We need to get this info into the resistance networks. If we can’t access the code, maybe we can come up with a physical countermeasure.”

  “I think they’ll notice if we all start wearing tinfoil hats,” said Addy.

  “If we can figure out a way to get a warning before the execute code activates the NCM override that would be something. We are headed back to Mirada station. We need to find Leyla, if we can, and get this data to Tartarus either way. With luck, the underground can come up with a solution.”

  “While we’re trying to stop a war,” said Sarah.

  “Yes,” agreed the Captain. “While we’re trying to stop, or win, a war.”

  “Are we sure we actually want to stop the war?” asked Brooks. “That kind of chaos might be just what we need to get one over on the company.”

  “We have to try,” said William. “Humanity has seen that they have access to an army that can’t argue or desert. Fourteen billion puppets that are already dead, as far as humanity is concerned. AfterLife will let the living continue taking the dead, because otherwise they would have to admit the truth. If we don’t stop the war, it will be so much worse than Mirada.”

  “The company is good at protecting itself. They’ll have convinced the Navy that reanimates aren’t worth the trouble,” Brooks said with a dismissive hand gesture.

  “No, they won’t.” William shook his head.