by Patty Jansen
Laura gave Melati an exasperated look over their heads.
Melati mouthed, “Sorry.” The boys should have listened to her unconditionally. She was powerless to make them better. The cohort was very, very fragile. She took pride in the fact that she’d never lost a cohort.
“They’re not doing any harm,” she said. “They need to be together, especially at this age.” Stupid excuses. The fact was that she did not control them, and she should.
“I’ve not studied the psychology of them,” Laura said, but her tone was icy.
Melati remembered yesterday, and how she’d challenged Laura’s authority in front of the emergency nurses, probably made her look like an idiot. Yes, it had been the right thing to do by the boys, but seeing the severity of what was wrong with them, less noise during wake-up wouldn’t have made a difference. She was being stupid, arrogant and pedantic.
Just like she was being pedantic about smugglers. Getting people into trouble because of her outspoken opinions. People who had much more serious problems, like Rina. At least the girls who fell into the smugglers’ clutches were well-fed. And they received medical care, most of them at least. If you were a tier 2 citizen in New Jakarta, those things mattered more than anything else.
To these boys, their brothers mattered. They were all standing around Esse, touching his hands and arms. Esse was out cold, with a respirator mask over his face.
Clearly, they did not consider Keb a brother, because none of them had gone to his bed.
To her surprise, he was awake and watched the proceedings with as much freedom as his harness allowed. Melati went to sit on the edge of his bed.
“How are you today?”
“Are you going to let me out?”
“That all depends on whether the doctor can fix you.”
“I don’t need to be fixed. I need to find this guy who’s taken off with my body.” His eyes met hers, furious. “Why won’t you let me find him?”
Melati folded her hands in her lap. How did you explain to someone that their intense emotions weren’t real?
“Why won’t no one fucking believe me?”
She met his eyes. “You know, I really don’t like it when you use that sort of language—”
“I’m not a child—”
“I don’t like it from adults either.” Harsher than she intended.
A hesitation. “Sorry.”
He let a silence lapse and looked sideways. “I need your help. I need someone to believe me. That guy thinks I’m nuts.”
“Dr Chee? He’s a very good doctor.”
“He won’t listen. He thinks he knows what’s going on with me. It’s all rogue material and someone else’s memories. Whatever I say, I can’t change his mind.”
“Do you think I can? I’m a teacher. Dr Chee has a lot of experience and he is doing his best to help you.”
“But that’s going to take too long!” His voice spilled over. He angrily wiped tears away. “This guy has my body and I’m stuck here as a little boy. You know that no one ever takes children seriously?”
Ouch, that hurt. At home in the B sector, Melati always said that no one listened to powerless girls either. She breathed out heavily.
“All right then. Not making any promises, but tell me who is this person you want to find, exactly?”
A small pause. Then a mischievous smile that was too boyish to be serious and too mature to suit a six-year-old boy. “His name is Paul Ormerod. He’s a scientist, from Ganymede.”
Yeah—right. Like those types of mindbases freely wandered about the place. Ganymede was where rich people lived. The Laws and the Hasegawas. They didn’t go on mindswaps. They didn’t call it Poor Man’s Travel for nothing.
“Who is Jas Grimshaw?”
“I am Jas Grimshaw. Paul Ormerod has taken off with my body. I want it back.”
“You were on a mindswap?”
“Yes.”
Except there had been no sign of a Jas Grimshaw in the mindbase exchange. And it was extremely unlikely that a mindbase could have jumped all the security and firewalls between StatOp and the base. There was no direct link between the StatOp and ISF computers. End of story. “This . . . Paul Ormerod, did he watch you in the playground?”
He frowned. “Playground? What are you talking about? The guy is from Ganymede.”
“But he watched you in the playground, and talked to you when you went to pick up the ball when it rolled near his feet.”
His frown deepened. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Your memories from Before.”
“Ah.” His expression cleared. For a while, he said nothing, and stared at the ceiling. A slight frown flickered over his face. “Before, huh?”
Melati nodded.
He turned his head to her; his eyes glittered. “I don’t remember Before.”
“On the other side of the playground was a beach, with crashing waves.” She said it to jog his memory, but it struck her how neither of them had seen a beach, nor would they ever see one. Grandma would sometimes talk about the beach and palms, real ones, and not Harto’s crooked-trunked ones in the docking area. She would talk of the smell of fish, and the markets in her home village, and of a large green and bumpy fruit called a durian that stank like hell but tasted like heaven.
For Melati, those memories were like Before: her imagination set to the words spoken by Grandma.
He shook his head. “I don’t remember any of it.”
“Not playing with your brothers?”
He shook his head.
“And the man who came to talk to you?”
He kept shaking his head. A tear leaked out of his eyes and rolled over his cheek. “See, I’m turning into a little boy. You have to help me find this guy before I forget everything.”
Melati took Keb’s hand. This was by far the strangest thing that had ever happened to any of her cohorts, and she hoped that someone, somewhere, soon, found out how to fix it. And though he had no proof for any of his statements, his sincerity disturbed her deeply.
She said, “I’ll help you sort it out.” But she had no idea how.
Chapter 12
* * *
“MELATI?”
She hadn’t noticed Dr Chee in the corner; the light was dim in the room, he had been hidden behind an empty cot, and she’d been too busy looking at the boys. He rose from his seat and came towards her.
Was it the light in this room or did he always have such bags under his eyes? Come to think of it, did he ever leave this office?
“How is he?” Melati asked, glancing at Esse.
“It was unfortunate that we had to bring him back here,” Dr Chee said, his voice mild. “He’d gone into an unresponsive state.”
“Dead body syndrome.”
He nodded. “When he came in here, he was in borderline stage 3. He’d stopped reacting to outside stimuli, but his muscles hadn’t cramped up yet.”
A shiver went over her back. It was as she expected. She’d seen the cramping up once, in a cohort not her own, and that was not something she ever wanted to see again.
She looked at the boy on the bed, incredibly pale, limp, with a narrow, mousey face, his blond hair falling over the many struts and metal bars of the immobility harness. His chest was obscured with wires. Tyro, Zax and Abe sat on the edge of his bed, their faces blue with light. Their expressions were anxious, frightened.
“What are you doing to him now?”
“We keep him sedated while we take the mindbase readouts. I’ve just completed the scan. So far, I think it’s pretty straightforward. Look at this.”
He went back to the computer, and hit a key, letting the blocks of code scroll over the wall screen before him.
Melati recognised a line of code here and there. She thought of Ari’s geckoes and what a silly idea it had been for her to offer to help him. There was no way she knew enough code to write an entirely new mindbase.
“This is the motor control section,” she
said.
Dr Chee nodded. “Watch.”
Just as he said this, the scrolling process reached an area with sections repeated in the code, and other blocks that consisted of nothing except empty brackets.
“Urgh, yes, I see. That would cause problems.”
“Yes, you’ve seen that correctly. Compare with this . . .” He flicked the screens around and showed her another file. It was much tidier. “That’s Simo. That’s healthy.”
Melati could see that. “How would Esse have ended up with this fault?”
“We see this sort of thing when a mindbase becomes damaged as a result of a power outage or a minor copy failure, like storage fault or a temperature alert. Or also faulty data streaming, where the begin and end codes of the related mindbases overlap.” He shrugged. “But those are a few of many.”
“So this fault wasn’t caused by anything that happened after he woke up?” Melati glanced at Laura, but she had gone back to her glass cubicle.
“Highly unlikely. Based on your report from yesterday, I had a psychologist assess his files, but he only confirmed my assessment that he needed to come in for checking. And then I got Christine’s call for assistance this morning.”
That explained everything the boys had been talking about. Except Louise’s strange behaviour.
“Anyway, this one’s easy and will be quick to fix. Not so with the other one . . .” He glanced at Keb’s crib, and an expression of worry came over his face.
Melati asked, “Do you think that whatever happened to Keb could have caused Esse’s problems?”
“That is a possibility.”
Melati noticed that the boys around Esse’s bed were all looking at her and listening. “Can I talk to you in private?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Of course.” He gestured her into his office.
After he had closed the door and taken a seat at his desk, she began, “At breakfast, the boys said something that disturbed me.” She told him about the man in the playground. Even back when Melati first met Dr Chee by the side of her hospital bed more than ten years ago, his forehead would wrinkle in a certain way when he was worried. That wrinkle now formed and deepened while she spoke.
When she finished, he let a silence lapse before he said, “This boy is a mystery to me. I’ve checked the coding labs. I thought something might have gone wrong there, but Rosalie and I have gone through all the transfer logs and we can’t find anything unusual.”
By God, no wonder he looked tired.
Melati licked her lips. “I know it’s going to sound ridiculous, but I’m wondering if anyone has checked with Station Operations if there is a person named Jas Grimshaw in the Taurus Army staff.”
“I have considered that. I’ve asked Station Operations, but that information is off-limits to us, and we have no clear indication to request it. We need a warrant.” Yes, and probably StatOp would be exceedingly uncomfortable if anyone from ISF came blundering in looking for a stray mindbase. What sort of impression would that make? StatOp had never liked it much that ISF had descended upon the station. They liked playing kingdoms and didn’t like having the silent threat of a seriously armed force at their backs, even if it was supposedly a non-combat base of a friendly army.
He continued, “There are many Grimshaws at the station. Apparently someone in the coding lab contacted the mindbase exchange yesterday late A shift.” He shrugged. “You know, it’s the only other place where they deal with mindbases separate from bodies. We got a bit more cooperation there. The only recent Grimshaw record they have is of someone named Troy, but that’s a completed transfer and clearly a different person.”
Melati nodded. She already knew that. Troy, who had travelled from Mars. It was probably not worth bothering Rina to ask any further.
“We’re clutching at straws here,” Dr Chee continued. “He seems to have no clear memory of where he came from.”
“He mentioned Ganymede when I was just talking to him. Someone called Paul Ormerod who was supposed to have run off with his body.”
“Yes, he’s mentioned that to us as well, but his story doesn’t check out. A person named Paul Ormerod did exist, about two hundred years ago. He was from the Ganymede elite, and was killed during a work stint at Titan, age thirty-five.”
This was getting stranger by the minute. “Another thing—I’ve noticed that Keb said StatOp and barang-barang, and those are station words. He has not once mentioned anything from within the base or ISF.”
“True.” Dr Chee folded his hands on his lap. After a short silence, he continued, “But supposing the rogue memories came from the Taurus Army—that would leave a huge question: our system and the station system aren’t linked in any way, and certainly not in a way in which someone can accidentally copy a station mindbase onto our system.”
“Also true. On the other hand . . .” Melati hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she should mention her research within the walls of the ISF ring. “Have you ever read a very old paper by an author called Ruby Selinger?”
There was that wrinkle in his forehead again.
Melati pulled out her infopad. She flicked through the directory, found the paper, put the pad on the desk turned it around to face him.
He read the paper’s title. “Evidence for semi-autonomous movement by artificial intelligence files . . .” His eyes widened. “Where did you get this?”
“A very far corner of the library way back, when I first came here. I’ve had it for a long time, since I did my research course units. I never used it because it wasn’t relevant to my work. But I was impressed that the library had something this old and I thought it was interesting.”
“I bet. Look at the main author: Ruby Selinger, Allion Aerospace Ltd., Ares II Station. Do you know she worked with the original Ares team that put the first-ever people on Mars? I’m surprised that this is freely available. What level security clearing do you have?”
“None beyond the CAU. Anyway, I think it should be available. Allion did a lot of research on mindbase technology long before ISF could do anything like it.”
“Sure. That’s why we had the Mars revolt and all the deaths there. Because of their disposable soldiers. We don’t want to go that way ever again.”
Mars. Not that again. Melati swore most of the people in ISF had an inferiority complex over the events on Mars that, as far as she could see, were at least half their fault. After all, they had attempted to exclude Allion from the talks about the outer system governance, and Allion had brought the first colonists into space and, based on that, had some rights to territory and resources. Maybe, if ISF had been more accommodating, they wouldn’t have driven Allion towards the inhuman stuff they did, and people wouldn’t be stuck with this ugly and stupid war. But she really didn’t want to talk about that now.
“Anyway, in this paper, Dr Selinger suggests that some of their mindbases migrated through the system without outside assistance, and that they developed this ability independently. It suggests there are other papers, but I can’t find any of them.”
“That’s because the veracity of Allion-based data was called into question. Our own mindbase technology took a huge leap when scientists discovered that a number of Allion research papers we’d been using to piece the work together were elaborate fakes, designed to set us off in the wrong direction. This is why all Allion material was removed from research libraries. If you found this in our library, in the unrestricted section, you should report it so that it can be destroyed.”
Melati stared at the screen and couldn’t, for the life of her, think why anyone would fake these data, since they went against everything the original research tried to prove. “I don’t believe that this is a fake. I mean, these results—”
“No. Just, no. You don’t understand, Melati.”
“Don’t understand what? Yes, I understand the work was done by the company that has become the enemy, but does that mean we can’t look at what they did?”
He sighed. “Have you ever been
in contact with any Allion people?”
“No.” Had he? She didn’t think anyone had, except perhaps the high command. When you can see the enemy, you’re already too close to fight them, that sort of stuff.
“I have.” His dark eyes met hers in a stern look. “I have also spoken to people who survived Mars, people who are all dead now from radiation poisoning. Allion destroyed the Mars domes when we wouldn’t agree to their outrageous demands. They killed thousands of innocent people. It was all done with bots—Allion calls them aggregates—they look like and act like people, but they use rechargeable power, and very basic levels of oxygen and sugars to survive, which they store and recycle internally. They don’t need to breathe; they don’t need pressure suits and breathing apparatus to go into space. They don’t need radiation suits. You don’t want to know what they did, Melati, even after the domes were breached and most of the inhabitants had suffocated. And no, I cannot find it in myself to forgive.”
He let a silence lapse to compose himself.
Every time someone from ISF talked about war, Melati cringed inside. She prepared young boys for war. Many would fight. Kill and be killed. She had no idea what she was sending them into.
Life in the B sector was seedy and dangerous, but, considering places like New Pyongyang where tier 1 was shooting at people, New Jakarta was a holiday.
“I still don’t understand what Mars has to do with this old research paper. I don’t think anyone can ignore this kind of knowledge. If mindbases became autonomous, that would be really bad for us.” If a mindbase got angry while in storage, it’d be like the viruses the hypertechs loved to unleash on the StatOp systems, only alive.
“We should ignore the paper, because it’s rubbish. Allion no longer fight directly—they’d be wiped out of they did. Instead, they seed fear. That is the intent of the paper. Constructs going out of control. Mindbases moving themselves across systems. It is rubbish. Hocus-pocus. When you’re in the system, you’re dead. Many people have tried to look for signs of autonomy. None have found anything. People like perpetuating the myth, like those who believe in ghosts.”