Strangers Among Us

by Kelley Armstrong

  Without augmentations, he was just a Dog. And he couldn’t get augs because . . . well, when he was young there’d been medical reasons, but now it was simply because he was needed the way he was. Dogs were valuable, even if they weren’t valued. If the Dog got augmented now, he couldn’t compete with people who’d been amped since they were in utero. Rather than be an inadequate version of everyone else, he’d rather just be a Dog.

  He drifted down to Engineering. It was the biggest space in the ship: a cube three stories high, with lighting tubes thick on every surface to give a bright clear view of the machinery. Lots of light. Lots of air. When a warp-jump went long, the Dog amused himself by zooming about in zero G. Metal pipes and computer columns formed towers throughout the chamber, giving the Dog an obstacle course he could weave around. He could fly like a weightless bird, while down on the floor, crew-members stayed earthbound, strapped in their seats.

  That’s how it usually went . . . but today when the Dog arrived, he discovered a sleepwalker.

  Crew-members often moved during jump-sleep. They pushed imaginary buttons or lashed out at monsters in their dreams. A few spoke slurry words, saying more than they did when awake. But in all the Dog’s time on the ship, this woman was the first who’d managed to unstrap herself from her jump-couch.

  She was broad in body and face, but her hands were slim and wiry—apparently the ideal physique for engineers, since everyone else in Engineering had a similar build. The Dog had run into the woman on numerous occasions . . . sometimes almost literally. All crew-members walked around with an air of distraction, ignoring their surroundings as they mentally conversed with each other or scanned schematic diagrams that the ship transmitted into their brains; but this woman stood out from the rest for her strength of preoccupation. Several times, the Dog had been forced to dodge into hatchways to avoid her: as if she were sleepwalking even when she was awake.

  Now she really was sleepwalking: eyes open but gaze blank. The woman moved as if in a dream . . . but that dream seemed to involve dismantling the ship.

  She’d been at work for several minutes before the Dog arrived: reaching into machines and pulling out component pieces. Some of the pieces still floated close by her; others had drifted away in the absence of gravity, getting caught in the room’s tangle of equipment or else bouncing lazily off the walls.

  When the Dog saw what she was doing, he launched himself toward her. He grabbed her shoulder and tried to pull her away from the access panel where she was silently taking things apart. She howled and fought his grip, shouting sounds that weren’t words.

  She was strong—stronger than the Dog. He’d never had muscle enhancements. On the other hand, he was awake; she wasn’t. She was also accustomed to having every single action fine-tuned by chips and implants. With her mods shut down, she was uncoordinated. She flailed, all her movements off balance. The Dog took a clout to his jaw, but he got her away from the equipment. He pushed her clear, sending her floating toward the ceiling.

  That gave him time to catch his breath. And to rub his jaw. His bones were weaker than hers—especially his jaw versus her knuckles.

  The Dog surveyed the circuit-boards and other components caroming in all directions thanks to his tussle with the woman. More than a dozen machine parts were flying loose around the room. With every system safely shut down, the ship might not have been damaged by having its bits pulled out; however, restarting the ship was out of the question until everything got put back in place.

  If the woman had only pulled out one or two pieces, the Dog might have tried putting them back himself—square pegs would fit in square holes, right? But with so many parts yanked free, there was just too much chance of mistakes. Every piece had to be returned to its proper location; and the job had to be done fast, before everyone ran out of oxygen.

  The Dog muttered, “Never wake a sleepwalker.” Wasn’t that the old saying? But in this case, he had to make an exception.

  The Dog didn’t know how much the crew understood his job. They treated him . . . they treated him like a dog. A dog whose only trick was poking a single button.

  He had more tricks than that. Given the number of starships jumping around the galaxy, anything that could possibly go wrong had already happened on some other ship. A ship that survived an emergency did so because its Dog found a way to cope. Old Dogs talked to new ones and passed on their solutions, so if a problem happened again, every Dog could be prepared.

  This wasn’t a secret—not exactly—but the social disconnect between Dogs and crews encouraged deliberate ignorance. When was the last time a regular crew-member asked the Dog about his work? Never. Nobody on the ship wanted to know how much they depended on the Dog to keep them safe.

  For example, the dog always carried a stim-shot: an auto-injector that held enough stimulant to overcome someone’s warp-jump coma. It didn’t need much juice—unlike with a real coma, crew-members weren’t deeply unconscious. They were just shut down a little, so they wouldn’t face the trauma of being offline. They’d rather be anesthetized than deal with who they were without augments.

  The Dog hoped the sleepwalking woman wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown just for being woken prematurely.

  He had no difficulty reaching her. She’d stopped flailing—zero G was relaxing once you got over the initial strangeness. She was still grabbing at objects that only existed in her dreams, but she looked relatively peaceful.

  Until the Dog slammed the injector into her neck.

  Perhaps he used too much force. He’d never done this before; he didn’t know how hard to press. And he was nervous about being near her, considering how much his jaw still hurt. He wanted to get close as quickly as possible, inject her, then jump clear.

  But when he hit her with the injector, she didn’t strike back—she screeched. Then she curled up and moaned. She bounced off a wall, but didn’t notice. Like a billiard ball, she coasted from surface to surface until she bumped into some machinery and continued to moan in the middle of the room.

  From a safe distance, the Dog said, “Hello? Uhh . . . hello? Can you . . . sorry, this is important. Please calm down.”

  She uncurled a little from her fetal ball. “I can’t hear you!” she wailed. “I can’t see!”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” the Dog said. “You’re just offline.”

  “I’m blind,” she said, looking straight at him.

  “You’re not,” he told her. The Dog could see the woman’s eyes were focused on him. “It’s just that your augs are turned off. We’re still in warp-space. I think. But even if we’ve dropped back to the normal universe, we can’t restart till you fix the ship.”

  “What’s wrong with the ship?”

  “You . . . uhh . . . you were sleepwalking. By the time I found you . . .”

  The Dog gestured at the components drifting around the room. The woman squinted at them; she blinked, then widened her eyes as if she was trying to find a way to make her vision work properly. She said, “I couldn’t have . . .” then looked at her hands, moving them closer to her face then farther away as if she couldn’t focus. Most of the pieces that she’d handled were just clean electronics, but a few had been moving parts, covered with grease or oil. The Dog could tell she was seeing the residue on her fingers. She could probably smell it too.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh damn. I dreamed I . . .” She began to curl up again.

  “Hey, no!” the Dog said. “Please, no. We have to fix things. Before we run out of air.”

  “I can’t fix anything,” the woman snapped. “I don’t know where the pieces go.”

  “Then tell me who does know,” the Dog said, looking at the other engineers strapped on their couches. “I’ve got another stim-shot. I can wake anyone we need.”

  “Nobody knows,” the woman said. “It’s all on computer. Why would we memorize schematics when we can just look them up?”

  “What happens if the computer breaks down?”

  “We
look on another computer. Everything here has at least five-fold redundancy.”

  The Dog sighed. “No, it doesn’t. But maybe we have enough.” He waved at the floating components. “You gather those up. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To my Kennel.”

  It really was called the Kennel . . . unofficially, of course. Officially, it was just Bunk-Room C7, its only distinguishing feature that it wasn’t located in the same part of the ship as all the other bunk-rooms. The Dog had the space to himself: just him and the many emergency supplies that nobody wanted to know were there.

  Including a complete set of starship construction manuals. On paper.

  In the starship’s official records, the manuals were “Carbon Storage Sinks”. That wasn’t a lie—paper was a long-lasting material that sequestered carbon and kept it out of planetary atmospheres. At least it was a good enough storage medium to satisfy government requirements . . . and if you were going to manufacture paper anyway, you might as well print something useful on it.

  (The Dog suspected that someone had played fast and loose with regulations to make the manuals possible . . . but you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. The manuals had been in his Kennel when he first arrived on the ship, and he never asked where they came from.)

  Nine hefty books. The Dog had once thumbed through them, but they were completely over his head. He was a Dog, not an engineer; if the manuals were ever needed, he wouldn’t be the one using them. He’d just wake someone with the right expertise and say, “Here, hope these help.” He didn’t even know which manual he needed now . . . so he threaded them all together on a spare jump-couch strap, then he slung it over his shoulder. With gravity still at zero, he had no trouble dragging all the manuals back to Engineering.

  By the time he got there, the Sleepwalker had corralled the floating components. She’d taken off her uniform jacket and used it to wrap the pieces so they didn’t drift away again. She was shivering in just her shirtsleeves—with life-support off, the ship was beginning to cool. But when the woman saw the Dog, she tried to hide her shivers. She put on a neutral expression and asked, “Are those really books? On paper?”

  The Dog nodded. “Schematics and repair instructions.”

  “Paper books,” the woman said. “This’ll be like making fire by rubbing sticks together.” But when the Dog offered her the books, she took them and started flipping pages. After a moment, she made a face. “This is ridiculous. We’ll freeze before I find the right information.”

  “One of the books is an index,” the Dog said. “That might help.”

  The woman scowled, but found the index book and searched through it. The Dog wanted to ask if he could help, but decided against it—she would just say no. Nobody ever thought that Dogs had brains. He waited quietly as she paged through the index, then through another book. Eventually, she reached a complex-looking diagram; the dog saw her move her fingers across it, unthinkingly making the gesture that increased the size of a picture on a display screen. When nothing happened, she swore, squinted hard, and swore again. “This isn’t going to work!”

  “Wait,” the Dog said. “I have a magnifying glass.”

  “A what?”

  The Dog’s uniform had numerous pockets, and each was stuffed with knick-knacks he might need in a pinch. He pulled out his largest magnifying glass (he had three) and offered it to the woman.

  She looked at it dubiously. The Dog moved closer and held the glass over the page. “See what it does?”

  “Oh.” She took the glass and moved it up and down, back and forth, above the paper. “Better,” she said. “Primitive, but workable.” She floated toward the access panel where she’d pulled out all the components. “Let’s get started.”

  Several pieces went back easily, locking into connections that other pieces didn’t fit. But this left six electronic circuit-boards to fit into six identical sockets . . . and while the boards didn’t look exactly the same, they were close enough that they couldn’t be distinguished by looking at the diagram, even with the magnifying glass.

  “Aren’t they labeled?” the Dog asked.

  “Of course, they’re labeled,” the Sleepwalker woman answered. “With RFID tags.” She pointed to a tiny metal fleck on one of the boards. “If my internal systems were working, I could wave my finger over that and tell everything you’d ever want to know about the board. Make, model, serial number, date of manufacture . . .”

  “But the board doesn’t have a visible label?”

  “Visible labels can be misread,” the woman said dismissively. “And the writing can flake away or get damaged. And you have to actually look at them rather than just wave your finger. Besides, if you can’t read RFID, you have no business being in this . . .” She stopped and avoided looking in the Dog’s direction.

  The Dog asked, “What the worst that could happen if we plug a board into the wrong slot?”

  “I have no idea,” the woman answered, “but it won’t be good. Each of these circuits contains logic chips with millions or billions of coded instructions. If you put one in the wrong place, most likely the board will recognize it’s not connected properly and just do nothing . . . but that’s bad if the ship relies on it to do the right thing.”

  “I thought everything on the ship has five-fold redundancy. If something’s hooked up wrong, won’t four back-up systems just take up the slack?”

  “Maybe,” the woman said. “But restarting after warp shutdown is . . . delicate. Since a jump takes zero time, some systems are designed with the assumption that nothing could possibly have changed during the gap. They boot up assuming that everything is working the same as before the jump. They don’t start checking for possible errors until everything is back online.”

  “Oh,” the Dog said. “That sounds . . . ill-considered.”

  “It’s stupid is what it is,” the Sleepwalker said. “But if you want to slam an entire starship from drifting with every system off to every system running fully, and do it so fast that nobody notices an interruption, you have to take shortcuts. Once in a while, that bites you on the ass. Especially if some idiot goes ripping out pieces . . .”

  She stopped and turned away. The movement started her drifting across the room, away from the Dog and the machinery. “Uhh,” the Dog began . . . but what could he say? It’s not your fault? The woman must know that already. But she blamed herself anyway.

  After a few seconds, the Dog said, “We need to figure out which circuit-board is which. So we need to read the tags, right? How does RFID actually work?”

  The woman remained turned away, but she said, “Basically, you hit the tag with radio waves. That causes a sort of resonance inside the tag’s circuits; they echo back a signal filled with digital information.”

  “So we need a source of radio waves, and something to read the echo?”

  “Essentially.”

  The Dog pulled out his zapper. When he triggered it, a blue spark jumped between the terminals. “Okay, good news: we’re back in normal space-time. Our equipment should work.” He pushed the trigger again; it made another spark. “And I’ll bet this little gadget produces radio waves. Moving electricity does that, doesn’t it?”

  “Usually,” the woman said. “Probably enough for our purposes.”

  “So all we need is a reader.” The Dog tried to remember if he had anything like that in his emergency supplies. No. Everything was deliberately low-tech. “I don’t suppose you’d have some kind of battery-powered reader?”

  “Why would we?” the woman said. “We all have readers built in.” She brightened. “But if we’ve really settled back into normal space-time, I can just boot my augmen—”

  “Don’t!” the Dog interrupted.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve heard it’s not good to boot up in a vacuum. I mean, when no other systems are working. Because your augs will try to sync with everything else around them, and if they can’t . . .
things go wrong.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve just heard stories from other Dogs. If your implants try to connect, and nothing answers back, some of them just . . . wait. Meanwhile, other augs do start on their own, but they assume that everything else is running too, so they start pumping out hormones or whatever they do, and it’s all . . . it can go bad very quickly. Like a machine where half of the pieces start and half don’t, so they grind against each other.”

  The woman grimaced. “I get the picture. And it’s ridiculous.” She sighed deeply; the exhalation started her moving backward. “Don’t get me wrong, I believe what you’re saying. I’m an engineer. I know how short-sighted machine designers can be. Someone says, ‘We don’t have to worry about weird situations that can’t possibly happen.’ Then the situation happens and someone’s brain explodes.” She looked at the Dog. “That’s what you’re talking about, right?”

  “Probably not a literal explosion,” the Dog said. “But . . . imbalances. Maybe very bad.”

  “Always?” she asked.

  “It varies. You all have different implants . . . different natural metabolisms . . . it’s unpredictable.”

  “So if I reboot, I might be okay.”

  The Dog didn’t answer. He had no idea what the odds were for “okay” versus “dead”, or anything in between.

  The woman took a breath. “All right. Look down there.” She pointed to one of the other engineers, strapped unconscious on his couch. “If I can’t finish this myself, he’s the person to wake up next. He’ll know what needs to be done.”

  “We could wake him now,” the Dog said.

  “No. I know what needs to be done too. And I got us into this mess.”

  “You didn’t. It just happened.”

  The woman gave him a thin smile. “Nice try. If this works, the drinks are on me.”

  She reached both hands behind her head and rummaged through her hair. Augmented people always had reboot switches, but the locations varied; the Dog felt relieved that the woman didn’t have to undress to reach hers. After another moment of rummaging, she said, “Ah, there.” She gave the Dog a look, then her whole body jerked.