by Neil Clarke
To be flying along a corridor aligned with the polar jet of a magnetar just when it blows its lid is so unlikely as to be implausible. A local supernova, now that I could understand; when your voy ages are measured in centuries or millennia it’s only a matter of time before one of your ships falls victim. But a magnetar nearly ten thousand lights years away—that’s the universe refusing to play fair!
I touched your shoulder. “Can you hear me, Lamashtu?”
“She can’t.” Doctor-Mechanic Wo gently pushed my arm away with one of their free tentacles. “Look at her.”
I looked at you. You looked so still and calm, still frost-rimed with condensed water vapor from when the rescue team pulled you in through the pressure lock. You’d been in shutdown, drifting tethered to a hardpoint on the hull, for over three hours. Your skin is yellowing, the bruised bloom of self-destructing chromatophores shedding their dye payloads into your peripheral circulation. One of our human progenitors (like the pale-skinned, red-haired female you resemble) would be irreversibly dead at this point: but we are made of sterner stuff. I refused to feel despair. “How bad is it?” I asked.
“It could be worse.” Wo shrugged, a ripplingly elegant wave of contraction curling out along all their limbs. “I’m mostly worried about her neural chassis. Did she leave a soul chip inside when she was out on the hull?” I shook my head. Leaving a backup chip is a common ritual for those who work in high-risk environments, but you spent so long outside that you’d run the risk of diverging from the map of your memories. “She was wearing a chip in each of her sockets. You could try checking for them. Can you do a reload from chip . . . ?”
“Only if I could be absolutely certain it wasn’t corrupted. Otherwise I’d risk scrambling the contents of her head even worse. No, Lilith: leave your sister to me. We’ll do this the slow way, start with a full marrow replacement and progressively rebuild her brain while she’s flatlined. She should be ready to wake up after a month of maintenance downtime. Then we can see if there’s any lasting damage.”
I saw the records, sister. You were on the outside of the hull, on the wrong side of the ship. You were exposed to almost three thousand gray of radiation. The skin on your left flank, toughened to survive vacuum and cosmic radiation, was roasted.
“She should be alright for a while. I’ll get around to her once I’ve checked on everyone else . . . ”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “Who else was outside the hull? Isn’t she the most urgent case?”
The doctor’s dismay was visible. “I’m afraid not. You underestimate how many people have sustained radiation damage. You were inside a reaction mass tank, were you not? You may be the least affected person on the entire ship. Everyone’s been coming in with techné damage and odd brain lesions: memory loss, cognitive degradation, all sorts of stuff. Our progenitors didn’t design us to take this kind of damage. I’m still working on a triage list. You’re at the bottom of it; you’re still basically functional. Your sister isn’t in immediate danger of getting any worse, so—”
“—But she’s dead! Of course she isn’t going to get any worse!”
My outburst did not improve the doctor’s attitude. “I think you’d better go now,” they said, as the door opened above me and a pair of hexapods from Structural Engineering floated in, guiding a third companion who buzzed faintly as he flew. “I’ll call you when your sib’s ticket comes up. Now leave.”
Doctor-Mechanic Wo was trying to spare me from the truth, I think. Very few of us appreciated the true horror of what had happened; we thought it was just a violent radiation burst, that had damaged systems and injured our techné, the self-repair cellules that keep the other modular components of our bodies operational and manufacture more cellules when they die; at worst, that it had fried some of our more unfortunate company.
But while gamma rays wreak a trail of ionization damage, cosmic rays do more: secondary activation transmutes nuclei, turns friendly stable isotopes into randomly decaying radioactive ones. The scratching scraping flickers at the edge of my vision as I neared the escape hatch in the hydroxygen tank were but the palest shadow of the white-out blast of noise that scrambled the minds and eyes of a third of our number, those unfortunates who had berthed in modules near the skin of the ship, on the same side as the radiation beam. Functional for now, despite taking almost a tenth of your borderline-lethal shutdown dose, their brains are literally rotten with fallout.
We’re connectionist machines, our minds and consciousness the emergent consequence of copying, in circuitry, the wet meat-machine processes of our extinct human forebears. (They never quite understood their own operating principles: but they worked out how to emulate them.) Random blips and flashes of radioactive decay are the bane of nanoscale circuitry, be it electronic or spintronic or plasmonic. Our techné is nothing if not efficient: damaged cellules are ordered to self-destruct, and new, uncontaminated neural modules are fabricated in our marrow and migrate to the cortical chambers in head or abdomen, wherever the seat of processing is in our particular body plan.
But what if all the available molecular feedstock is contaminated with unstable isotopes?
Two months after my visit, Doctor-Engineer Wo called me from the sick bay. I was back in the mass fraction tank, scraping and patching and supervising: the job goes on, until all fuel is spent. At a tenth of realtime, rather than my normal deep slowtime, I could keep an eye on developments while still doing my job without too much tedium.
As disasters go, this one crept up on us slowly. In fact, I don’t believe anyone—except possibly Doctor-Engineer Wo and their fellow mechanocyte tinkers and chirurgeons—had any inkling of it at first. Perhaps our response to the radiation storm was a trifle disjointed and slow. An increase in system malfunctions, growing friction and arguments between off-shift workers. Everyone was a bit snappy, vicious and a little stupid. I gave up listening to Lorus Pinknoise after he interrupted a lecture on the evolution of main sequence stars to launch a vicious rant at a member of his audience for asking what he perceived to be a stupid question. (I didn’t think it was stupid, anyway.) The chat streams were full of irritation: withdrawal into the tank was easy. So I was taken by surprise when Wo pinged me. “Lilith, if you would come to bay D-16 in Brazil, I have some news about your sister that I would prefer to deliver in personal proximity.”
That caught my curiosity. So, for the first time in a month, I sped up to realtime, swam up towards the hatch, poked my way out through the tank meniscus, and kicked off along the corridor.
I noticed at once that something was wrong: a couple of the guideway lights were flickering, and one of them was actually dark. Where were the repair crews? Apart from myself, the corridor was deserted. Halfway around the curve of the tunnel I saw something lying motionless against a wall. It was a remora, a simple-minded surface cleaning creature (a true robot, in the original sense of the word). It hung crumpled beside a power point. Thinking it had run into difficulty trying to hook up for a charge, I reached out for it—and recoiled. Something had punched a hole through its carapace with a spike, right behind the sensor dome. Peering at it, I cranked my visual acuity up to see a noise-speckled void in place of its fingertip-sized cortex. Shocked, I picked up the pathetic little bundle of plastic and carried it with me, hurrying towards my destination.
Barrelling through the open hatch into the dim-lit sick bay, I saw Doctor-Engineer Wo leaning against a surgical framework. “Doctor!” I called. “Someone attacked this remora—I found it in the B-zone access way. Can you—” I stopped.
The sick bay was lined on every wall and ceiling with the honeycomb cells of surgical frames, the structures our mechanics use in free-fall lieu of an operating table. They were all occupied, their patients staring sightlessly towards the centre of the room, xenomorph and anthrop alike unmoving.
Wo turned towards me slowly, shuddering. “Ah. Lilith.” Its skin was sallow in the luciferine glow. “You’ve come for your sister.”
“What’s”—a vestigial low-level swallow reflex made me pause—“what’s happened? What are all these people doing here?”
“Take your sister. Please.” Wo rolled sideways and pushed two of the frames aside, revealing a third, sandwiched between them. I recognized you by the shape of your head, but there was something odd about your thorax; in the twilight it was hard to tell. “You’d better get her back to your module. I’ve done what I can for her without waking her. If and when you start her up she’s going to be hungry. What you do about that is up to you, but if you want my advice you won’t be there when she comes to—if experience is anything to go by.”
I noticed for the first time that Wo was not only ill; one of its tentacles was truncated, the missing tip protected by a neatly-applied occlusive caul.
“What happened to your—”
“The bit rot has affected a third of us, Lilith. You’re one of the lucky ones: there’s nothing better than a thick blanket of water for cosmic ray shielding.”
“Bit rot?” I still didn’t understand what was happening to us.
“Radiation-induced dementia. You may not be familiar with the condition: dementia is a problem that used to affect our progenitors when their self-repair mechanisms failed. Decaying neural networks malfunction by exhibiting loss of short-term memory, disinhibition, mood swings, violence. Eventual loss of motor control and death. In us, the manifestations are different. Our techné triggers a hunger reflex, searching for high-purity materials with which to build replacements for the damaged, purged mechanocytes. And our damage control reflex prioritizes motor control and low-level functions over consciousness. We’re quite well-designed, if you think about it. I’ve replaced your sister’s techné with fresh marrow and mothballed it: she’s stable for the time being, and if you can find her feedstock that isn’t contaminated with short half-life nuclei she’ll be able to rebuild herself. But you should get her to a place of safety, and hide yourself too.” “Why?” I blinked stupidly.
“Because the techné I shoved up her marrow is some of the last uncontaminated material on the ship,” Wo pointed out acidly. “There are people on this ship who’ll crack her bones to feed on it before long. If she stays here I won’t be able to protect her.”
“But—”
I looked around. Not all the silent occupants of the surgical frames were unconscious. Eyes, glittering in the darkness, tracked me like gunsights. Empty abdominal sacks, bare rib cages, manipulators curled into claws where Doctor-Engineer Wo had flensed away the radiation-damaged tissue. The blind, insensate hunger of primitive survival reflexes—feed and repair—stared at me instead of conscious minds. Suddenly my numb feet, the persistent pins and needles in my left arm, acquired a broader perspective.
“They’re hungry,” explained Wo. “They’ll eat you without a second thought, because they’ve got nothing with which to think it—not until they’ve regrown a neural core around their soul chip.” It waved the stump of a tentacle at me. “Jordan and Mirabelle have been rounding up the worst cases, bringing them here to dump on me, but they’ve been increasingly unforthcoming about events outside of late. I think they may be trying to keep themselves conscious by . . .” A tentacle uncurled, pointed at the pathetic husk of my remora. “Take your sister and go, Lilith. Stay out of sight and hope for rescue.”
“Rescue—”
“Eventually the most demented will die, go into shutdown. Some will recover. If they find feedstock. Once the situation equilibrates,
we can see about assembling a skeleton crew to ensure we arrive. Then there’ll be plenty of time to prospect for high-purity rare earth elements and resurrect the undead. If there’s anything left to resurrect.”
“But can’t I help—” I began, then I saw the gleam in Wo’s photo-receptor. The curl and pulse of tentacles, the sallow discoloration of its dermal integument. “You’re ill too?”
“Take your sister and go away.” Wo hissed and rolled upside down, spreading its tentacles radially around its surgical mouth-parts. “Before I eat you. I’m so hungry . . . ”
I grabbed your surgical frame and fled.
I carried you back to our module without meeting anybody, for which I was happy. Once inside, I was able to turn up the light level and see what had happened. You were a mess, Lamashtu; were I one of our progenitors I would weep tears of saline to see you so. Ribs hollow, skin slack and bruised, eyes and cheeks sunken. Wo had split open your legs, exposed the gleaming metal of your femurs, the neatly diagrammed attachment points of your withered muscle groups. There was a monitor on the frame, and with the help system I managed to understand what it was telling me. Muscles damaged, skin damaged, but that wasn’t all. Once upon a time our foremother bunked atop a nuclear reactor in flight from Mars to Jupiter; the damage here was worse. Your brain . . . there was not much there. Eighty percent of it dissolved into mildly radioactive mush. Wo decanted it, leaving your cranial space almost empty. But your soul chip was intact, with your laid-down backup: given a few litres of inert, non-decaying minerals you could grow a new cortex and awaken as from a dream of death. But where could I find such materials?
I have an ionization sensor. As I swept it around the module I saw that even our bed is radioactive. If you were to eat its aluminium frame and build a new brain from it, your mind would be a crazy patchwork of drop-outs and irrational rage.
I needed to find you pure feedstock. But according to Wo, the entire ship was as contaminated as if it had been caught in the near-lethal blast radius of a supernova, or flown for a quarter million years close to the active core of our galaxy.
There was one obvious place to look for pure feedstock, of course: inside the cortical shells of those survivors who were least affected by the magnetar burst. Inside my head, or people like me. What did Wo say about the symptoms? Anger and disinhibition first, loss of coordination only late in the day. I ought to be able to trust those who aren’t angry or hungry. But I looked at you and wondered, how many of them would also have friends or lovers to nurse? Any friendly face might be a trap. Even a group of rational survivors, working together, might—
I shook my head. Trying to second-guess the scale of the breakdown was futile. There might be other places where feedstock could be found, deep inside the core of the ship. The never-used, moth-balled fusion reactors: they would be well-shielded, wouldn’t they? Lots of high-purity isotopes there. And with enough working brains and hands, surely we could repair any damage long before they were needed for deceleration. The cold equations seemed simple: with enough brains, we can repair almost any damage—but with a skeleton crew of senile zombies, we’re doomed.
So I collected a bundle of tools and left you to go exploring.
The darkened corridors and empty eye-socket spaces of the Lansford Hastings public spaces are silent, the chatter and crosstalk of the public channels muted and sparse. They’ve been drained of air and refilled with low-pressure oxygen (nitrogen is transmuted too easily to carbon-14, I guess). There’s no chatter audible to my electrosense: anyone here is keeping quiet. I pass doors that have been sealed with tape, sprayed over with a symbol that’s new to me: a red “Z” in a circle, evidence that the dementia cleanup teams have been at work here. But for the most part the ship appears to be empty and devoid of life—until I reach the F Deck canteen.
Eating is a recreational and social activity: we may be able to live on an injection of feedstock and electrolytes and a brisk fuel cell top-up, but who wants to do that? The canteen here mainly caters to maintenance workers and technicians, hard-living folks. In normal circumstances it’d be full of social diners. I hesitate on the threshold. These circumstances aren’t normal—and the diners aren’t social.
There’s a barricade behind the open hatch. Flensed silvery bones, some of them drilled and cracked, woven together with wire twisted into sharp-pointed barbs. A half-dissected skull stared at me with maddened eyes from inside the thicket of body parts, mandible clattering against its upper jaw. It gibbe
rs furiously at teraherz frequencies, shouting a demented stream of consciousness: “Eat! Want meat! Warmbody foodbody look! Chew ‘em chomp ‘em cook ‘em down! Give me feed me!” Whoops, I think, as I grab for the hatch rim and prepare to scramble back up the tunnel. But I’m slow, and the field-expedient intruder alarm has done its job: three of the red-sprayed hatches behind me have sprung open, and half a dozen mindlessly slavering zombies explode into the corridor.
I don’t waste time swearing. I can tell a trap when I stick my foot in one: someone who isn’t brain-dead organized this. But they’ve picked the wrong deck-hand to eat. You and I, Lamashtu, we have inherited certain skills from our progenitor Freya—and she from a distant unremembered sib called Juliette—that we do not usually advertise. They come in handy at this point, our killer reflexes. Hungry but dumb, the zombies try to swarm me, mouthparts chomping and claws tearing. I raise my anti-corrosion implement, spread the protective shield, and pull the trigger. Chlorine trifluo-ride will burn in water, scorch rust: what it does to robot flesh is ghastly. I have a welding lamp, too, an X-ray laser by any other name. Brief screams and unmodulated hissing assault me from behind the shield, gurgling away as their owners succumb to final shutdown.
The corridor cleared, I turn back to the barricade. “This isn’t helping,” I call. “We should be repairing the—”
A horrid giggle triggers my piloerectile reflex, making the chromatophores in the small of my back spike up. “Meaty. Spirited. Clean-thinking.”
The voice comes from behind the barricade (which has fallen silent, eyes clouded). “Jordan? Is that you?”
“Mm, it’s Lilith Longshanks! Bet there’s lots of eating on those plump buttocks of hers, what do you say, my pretties?”