Severance

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Severance Page 42

by Chris Bucholz


  “What?”

  “We got dumb,” Helot summarized. “All of us, in differing degrees, some not as bad as others, got dumb. You can believe that, I’m sure.” Years of handling public complaints lent her little cause for disagreeing. “We noticed it happening,” he continued, “but couldn’t figure out why. Too dumb, I guess. It wasn’t until maybe twenty years ago that the navy docs finally pieced it together. It was the gene tinkering. There was a problem with the software. A concurrency issue they called it. Two programs interfering with each other.”

  “We’ve been made dumb?”

  Helot nodded. “Accidentally, yes. It’s so…” He chuckled. “It’s so stupid.” He watched her carefully for a reaction which wasn’t forthcoming. “We — my predecessors I mean — were just trying to make everyone docile. Sheeping they called it.” He looked over at Sergei’s slumped form. “So, that one was on us. But there was some even weirder stuff going on in those tinkerers, real mad–scientist shit that we’re still trying to piece together. Whatever it was, we can see the impact it had when those two programs started interfering with each other: stupidity.” He looked her in the eyes. “Do you get it now? Every person born in the past two hundred years has been put through those stupid tinkerers.”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Amen,” Helot said. He leaned back against the wall and stretched his legs out. He looked like he was enjoying getting this off his chest. “Here’s the thing, though. Although this specific problem was insane, and completely unexpected, the ship has long had contingency plans for something like this. That’s the reason it even can split in two. Plan A was always to stop the whole ship with the whole population. But the ship’s designers anticipated the possibility of the population decreasing, due to disease or famine or some other reason…”

  “Space wasps?”

  Helot looked at her blankly. “Sure. So, they made the ship capable of Plan B: the engine core could separate and arrive at Tau Prius as a smaller, more efficient ship.” Helot patted the deck beneath him. “This ship.”

  Stein felt physically ill as she thought of a question and the probable answer at the same time. “In Plan B, the rest of the ship is left to drift away. Empty.”

  “That was the original intent, yes,” Helot said, now avoiding eye contact.

  “But that’s not what you’re doing.”

  Helot’s face paled. “Not long after the cosmic bombardment, when the extent of the genetic damage became apparent, my predecessors began weighing their options. ‘Modified Plan B’ was what they came up with. A pretty antiseptic term for what they were proposing.” Helot rubbed his pant leg again and licked his lips. “In this plan, we keep the ship’s population relatively high. The genetic repair work continues, attempting to repair any damage caused by the external radiation. Then when we reached Tau Prius, if the symptoms had waned, we would stop the whole ship as normal.”

  Stein finished the story. “And if that didn’t work, you would arrive, take the best and healthiest of the population with you, and discard the rest.”

  “Yeah.” Helot blinked and poked at the corner of his eye again. “They left the decision to me. Imagine reading that memo your first day on the job.”

  Stein felt her face flush. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself.”

  Helot smiled sadly. “I don’t. But honestly, what would you have done, Laura? Save the whole ship?”

  “Obviously! They’re healthy! You’re throwing lives away because they’re too stupid? Because they messed up your goddamned weightings?” she spat the last word out. “You decided that fifty thousand people were dumb enough to be shed off. To save fuel.”

  “Laura, please…” Helot began, almost whispering.

  “No! You’re murdering thousands of people. To save fucking fuel!”

  “Laura!” Helot hissed. “Want to guess what my job is here? It’s to start a colony on Tau Prius III. It’s not to protect every person on this ship. It’s to start that fucking colony. Out there are fifty thousand people who would be useless on the ground. Tau Prius III is a frozen shithole. Have you seen the brochures? Half these people would be dead within a year. I know it.” He looked away, shaking his head. “You know it.” He turned back to her and pounded the floor, ignoring Stein’s hand as it wavered over the terminal. “Those people out there, they’re not healthy. They’re dumb as rocks. Really, it was no choice at all. The best chance of starting this colony is without the morons. I’ve run the calculations.”

  “You’ve run the calculations?” Stein’s eyes widened. “You keep saying that. Holding your spreadsheet up like it’s a security blanket. You think you can figure out whether or not to murder people because a computer told you?”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Laura. I was groomed to make this decision. All modesty aside, there is literally no one better suited to make this call. So, when I say that I’ve run the calculations, that means something!” Helot’s nostrils flared. “If you spent the last two decades in my shoes you’d do the same thing.”

  “Then maybe it’s your shoes that are the problem,” she spat. “Asshole,” she added, because that too needed to be said. “I’ve at least met the people you’re talking about killing. When was the last time you left your little calculation–nest?”

  Helot laughed. “Laura Stein, speaker for the people? Did you know I talked to Curts about you? I know who you are. You fucking hate the people.”

  Stein smiled through clenched teeth. “Yeah, I maybe do. But you don’t even know them.” Her terminal flickered. On the screen there were now two buttons, Boom 1 and Boom 2. She frowned. The sound of a door opening, her heart skipping, hand fluttering over the terminal. She ducked down behind the reactor again. “Stay back!” she yelled. “I will blow the crap out of this fucking ship if you come in here!”

  “Please don’t,” Bruce said. He rounded the reactor behind her and stopped, looking down on her. “We need that to live.” He waved at Helot. “Hey, Captain. Nice work with all the treachery.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Helot asked, eyes wide.

  Bruce walked over to Helot and extended his hand. “I’m Bruce. We haven’t met yet, but I’ve been quietly foiling you for some time now.” He waggled his hand in front of Helot’s face. “Well, sometimes not that quietly.”

  Some moans from the corner of the room. The two naval technicians were awake again, and to judge by their somewhat alert expressions, may have been for some time. Sergei was coming around again, as well. Time to get this show on the road. “Bruce,” Stein said. “I’ve got two buttons here, marked Boom 1 and Boom 2.”

  Bruce turned around to look at her. “Are you actually going to do it?”

  She smiled. “Yeah. He said I was right.”

  “Well, okay then. Still, you’ve got some serious lady–balls, Stein.”

  “Thanks.” She tilted her head in the direction of her terminal. “So?”

  “Ahh, yeah.” He looked to the other side of the room, his brow furrowed. “I would have made that Boom 1, I think,” he said, pointing at the base of the reactor.

  “Are you sure?”

  He looked past the reactor, to the door to the life–support section. “I am totally sure. The others are definitely linked to Boom 2.”

  “What others?” Helot asked. “Other whats?”

  “Because if you’re not sure,” Stein said, “…and if this is our last conversation ever, I’m going to be very upset with you.”

  “This is a pretty bad last conversation ever,” Bruce agreed. “Maybe some more puns?”

  “Boom 2?” she asked again.

  “It would blow if I was wrong, wouldn’t it?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Helot, do you know how hot antimatter annihilation is?” Bruce asked, turning his head to the captain. “Because if it’s going to get balmy in here, I’m going to take my shirt off first.”

  “I’m serious. Fuck you,” Stein
said. Her finger hovered over Boom 2.

  “Laura! Urk. Don’t!” Sergei urked.

  “Relax, kid,” Bruce said, stripping the upper half of his coveralls off. “She’s not an abomination,” he added, his mouth hanging open in delight.

  “This has to stop,” she said.

  She pressed Boom 2.

  Epilogue

  The broken thermostat popped out with a simple twist. Stein tucked it in her webbing and popped the new one into place. She checked it was sending signals to the heating coil upstream, then slid the access panel back into place. “That should do it,” she said, climbing down off the ladder.

  The office manager offered a thin–lipped remark about how long it had taken, which Stein simply took as the ‘thank you’ it was probably meant to be. He did seem less put–out then he had been when she arrived, and she left the office with the slightly satisfied feeling of having fixed another problem.

  She walked down the halls back to the maintenance office, carefully maneuvering her ladder through the afternoon crowds. Almost quitting time for her, well past quitting time for everyone else it seemed. Though it was a Friday, she supposed. She reached the maintenance office and stowed her ladder before stepping into the locker room to change, running into two of her team members finishing their shifts, as well. Tools stowed and pleasantries exchanged, she soon left the maintenance office, finding Bruce waiting for her outside. He wordlessly fell into step beside her as they rounded the corner and boarded the escalator up.

  “Should have left early,” he said behind her. “It’s going to be busy.”

  She turned around to face him, one step higher, temporarily taller. “No one was stopping you, big guy,” she replied. “Or did you need me to hold your hand?”

  “Brave talk,” Bruce said, shaking his head. “And you know how much I hate boasting.”

  Upstairs, they had to pick their way through a group of government workers enjoying a post–work game of freeze tag. “Morons,” Bruce said, sidestepping a statue frozen in a vaguely obscene position.

  Stein didn’t say anything, only allowing herself a faint smile. She hadn’t told Bruce that part of the story, for fear he might take it the wrong way. Not that she thought any less of him; he was still one of the smartest people she knew. But she didn’t want to imagine what he would do if he was told he had a genetic predisposition to idiocy. A lot of moping around in a cap and gown, probably. Calculus–themed tattoos. Months of spite–fueled study and self–improvement. He would be happier not knowing.

  They stopped outside her apartment, Bruce waiting while Stein checked Mr. Beefy quickly, before grabbing her umbrella from the hook beside the door. “I’ll let you borrow it later if you ask nice,” she said once back outside, ignoring his rolled eyes.

  They continued down the street, passing crowded stalls of vendors hawking recreational beverages to the crowds, warming them up for the weekend. Before long, they were forced to slow, the crowd thickening as it pushed through the bottleneck formed by the bulkhead doors just ahead. She let Bruce move ahead of her, trailing behind in the lee of his shoulders as they approached the first set of doors. Brightness ahead as they approached the second set, passing through those to the outside.

  The sky was very, very big. Too big, really. Regardless of the weather, umbrellas were always a popular accessory for people outside the colony. Stein opened hers now, pulling it low over her head so that she could only see the ground. Bruce made amused noises beside her, only his lower body visible as they walked the well–worn path to the Prairie. Such a tough guy. Although if she could see his head, she was sure she would see his eyes carefully focused on the ground in front of him.

  Helot had almost been right. The contingencies had contingencied, leaving the Argos — all of it — just barely enough reaction mass to slide into orbit around Tau Prius III. A success, but not a complete one. There was essentially no fuel to transfer to the surface for the colonization efforts. The first year was marked by a few very necessary, very unironic bonfires; a few people had indeed frozen to death. Helot had been polite enough not to crow about this.

  But only a few died. And when one of the landing crafts found a vein of uranium a few months later, and the ship’s fabricators cobbled together an enrichment apparatus and simple nuclear reactor, things got a lot better. With a source of power, some of the fabrication equipment was moved to the surface, allowing construction of the colony to begin in earnest.

  Not unexpectedly, the colony that developed ended up looking a lot like the Argos. Mostly underground, almost entirely enclosed. This wasn’t just to protect against the cold, although it certainly did that. Argosians, it seemed, just liked being indoors.

  Stein tripped over a rock, stumbling forward a few steps before catching herself. She still had to concentrate on picking up her feet with each step, especially on uneven ground, even after being down here longer than almost everyone. Of all the people who had wanted to — and a lot had — she had one of the most legitimate claims to stay on the Argos, in that she had something actually useful to do up there. But she hadn’t hesitated when volunteers were sought out, and was on one of the first crafts down to the surface.

  There were still a few thousand on the Argos. Naval personnel mainly, along with a sizable amount of the ship’s security corps, who had felt more than a little unpopular after ‘all that business,’ as the incidents just prior to D–Day were now called. The full story never came out; few knew there was a story in the first place.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bruce had a knack for demolitions — nearly every component of the aft’s life support was ruined. A partial evacuation of the core had actually been necessary; security, naval officers, and their families hustled back down to street level for their own safety. It hadn’t taken long to explain to Helot what they had done and what it meant. He didn’t put up much of an argument; Stein thought he seemed almost relieved that someone had forced his hand. One last bit of blackmail followed, when Stein explained that only she could stop Kinsella from unleashing his suicide bombers. It had barely counted as blackmail, really; all the fight had gone out of Helot by that point. Unlikely as it might have seemed at the start of the day, Stein and Bruce ended up walking out of the core under their own power.

  A year later, the Argos finally arrived at its destination. Although still quite isolated, they were at least out of deep space and now moving at a much more sedate speed. In a small way, it felt like they had rejoined the rest of the universe.

  How the rest of the universe felt about that was still unknown.

  Stein flicked the edge of her umbrella up a bit, catching a glimpse of the summer sky and the metallic roofs of the Prairie just over the next rise. The New Prairie really, although no one called it that. One of the few outlying buildings in the colony, the proprietors had felt it thematically necessary to build the thing outdoors, however much it might hurt business.

  Bruce tipped the edge of her umbrella up and looked down at her. “Wanna go see a play tonight?” he asked.

  Stein’s eyes widened. “Why? Am I in trouble?”

  “You need to spend more time around people that aren’t at work. Or in a bar.”

  “I like bar folk. I think you need to spend less time around people that aren’t in a bar.”

  When her feet hit the tiled terrace of the bar, Stein folded her umbrella and ducked inside, away from the dreaded sky. She settled in to a table at the back, Bruce plopping down beside her. “Four beers, please,” Bruce said when the waiter approached. They sat in silence for a while, looking at anything but each other, watching the bar get progressively noisier as the after work crowd streamed in. Stein could see the grassy area outside filling up with braver sorts, daredevils who could look at the sky without throwing up, along with a handful who just enjoyed recreational vomiting.

  When the waiter returned with their drinks, Bruce seized one and drained half of it. Stein took a slightly more ladylike approach with hers. “So, what’s up with
this play?” she asked. “You hate that kind of thing.”

  Bruce evaded her look for a moment, then seemed to think better of it. Returning her gaze, he shrugged. “I do. Just heard a guy talking about it today. Thought you might like it. Thought you might like him.” A long, loathing gaze from Stein. “Just trying to get you out there,” he said defensively.

  This had traditionally been Ellen’s job, and Stein felt a momentary wave of sadness wash over her. “I’m out there,” she finally said, speaking more into her beer than to her friend.

  “Who was the last person you talked to outside of work?”

  Stein spun the glass around in her hands, not looking up. “So, I’m out there at work. That’s legitimate. I’ve got work friends is all.”

  Bruce snorted. “No, you don’t. You’re their boss, Stein. Don’t try to be that friendly boss who’s always up in everyone’s business. People hate that. Imagine Kinsella hanging out with you all the time, just being friendly all over you,” he said. “That’s what you look like to work people.”

  Nominally, Kinsella was now Stein’s direct boss, but he mostly left her alone. He was pretty busy now, governing the colony and being generally appalling. Of all the lessons to be learned during ‘all that business,’ the only one the mayor took away was the observation that no one seemed to mind or even notice that democracy had been suspended during Helot’s coup. And when the colony had been established enough for people to stop dying, he had inserted himself into the position of Colony Administrator, a position with some curiously unspecific term limits. Admittedly, he wasn’t doing that bad a job of it yet, aside from the half–dozen violent tantrums he threw each day.

 

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