by Mur Lafferty
She let out a relieved sigh when she found that her valuables were still there. All but one. She locked the safe again and slid it deep under her bed. Around her room, she saw the wall terminal with a small drive below it, plugged into the mainframe. She pulled up the operating system, since IAN was still down, and accessed the drive.
Unlike all the logs, the data were still there, in all their glory. She chewed her lip, then blessed the firewalls that had protected the drive. She removed it, unlocked her safe, then tossed it inside.
She wondered if she should tell the captain, but decided to wait for the right time.
Maria took a long shower to remove the tacky fluid, and finally felt like herself for the first time since she had woken up. She slipped on sweatpants and a T-shirt and set an alarm for fifteen minutes so she could catch a short nap. Then she would go back to work.
Alone with Hiro.
She would hand her frame to the captain tomorrow; this wasn’t important enough to wake her up. It was probably a joke Maria had played on Hiro, or one he was playing on her.
Speaking of Katrina, she might demand searches of all the quarters. Maria made a mental note to find a better hiding place for her personal items. Items she should spend some more time with later.
As Hiro loaded the drive into the terminal in his room, he thought about the captain and Wolfgang challenging each other with their killer instincts. Two wolves among sheep that recognized each other, maybe?
He needed to find someone to confide in; otherwise the mission would die due to lack of trust, not the multiple murders. But if the two people in charge were already murderers, what did that make the others?
The drive had one video on it. It was of Hiro’s own tear-streaked face. He stood alone in the helm. He took a deep breath and then spoke in rapid Japanese.
“If by chance they want to wake me up again, tell them not to. I’m having blackouts. I don’t know who I am anymore. She was badgering me, pushing me, wanting to know everything about me. I think it triggered something—old.” He winced as he stuttered the words. Hiro knew what he meant. He didn’t need to say it. “Now the captain is hurt, IAN is hacked, our mindmap programs are shot. And I can’t remember a lot of the last few weeks. I tried talking to the doctor, but she says it’s just stress and insomnia, and gave me something to sleep deeper. Then I woke up in the garden right where Maria found me a few weeks ago. I don’t remember going there! I was picking herbs. I think I was helping—”
His voice had climbed to a high pitch. He closed his eyes for a moment and then continued, a bit calmer.
“I’m hoping they can clean up my mess with me gone. IAN shut the grav drive down a minute ago before he started eating all the logs. I have to hurry if there’s going to be enough gravity to do what I need to.”
He took a great hiccupy breath. “Something is broken inside me. Maria’s seen it. I’m so tired. I’ve fought it for too long. Don’t wake me up again. Let the broken, branching line of Akihiro Sato end with me. I’m sorry. If I hurt anyone, I’m sorry.”
During this confession, his hands worked at the cable to fashion a noose. Watching this, Hiro found himself telling himself No, don’t do it, even when he had already witnessed the inevitable result of this suicide note.
The camera then shot the glass dome of the helm, and the spinning stars began to slow down. Hiro returned with a screwdriver and his boot. “I need to secure this on an external drive. I can’t trust IAN not to delete this. I’m signing off.”
The video feed went black. The audio continued for another moment, catching a distant scream, well down the hall from the helm.
Hiro sat for some time, motionless on his bed. Then he watched it again. He pulled the drive from his tablet and walked over to the trash chute that went straight to the recycler. He dropped the drive down the chute, listening to it clack against the sides, faster and faster as the heavier gravity on the outer floors of the ship pulled it down with each ricochet.
He took a short shower, then lay down and stared at the ceiling.
That suicide note would just give them the wrong idea.
He hadn’t killed everyone.
He knew he hadn’t.
Life Is Cheap
Joanna had decided to work through the night on the murder time line, but was dismayed to see the captain at the medbay door, watching her.
“What can I do for you, Captain?” Joanna asked as she motioned Katrina inside.
“I wanted to see how you were doing on the time line?” Katrina said.
“You’ll be the first to know when I get it worked out.”
Katrina walked over to her older clone’s bed. “I thought I gave you an order about this.”
“I decided to ignore that order in the interest of the patient,” Joanna said, straightening and rolling toward Katrina.
“That’s mutiny.” Katrina’s voice was cold.
“It’s well within my rights to do so. You have expressed interest in killing my patient, while I think she needs to live a bit longer.”
“Recycling the material to benefit the crew,” Katrina corrected. She sat down in the chair next to the bed as if keeping vigil. She didn’t look away from her own bruised face.
Joanna deposited her tablet on a cart and picked up a notebook, not moving too quickly. Katrina hadn’t attempted to touch the body, not yet, anyway. She gave Joanna an irritated glance when she arrived.
“Paper?” she asked.
“Considering where the last logs ended up, I think it’s safest,” Joanna said. “I’m backing them up verbally, but for now I’m not putting any data into that computer. Does Wolfgang have the rest of the ship under control?”
“As much as we can.”
“Are you all right, Captain?” Joanna asked.
“Absolutely,” Katrina said.
“Have you slept?”
“No.”
“Captain, you know you need to sleep. The new body needs a lot of food and rest. In lieu of food, you should rest for at least a little while,” Joanna said.
“You’re not resting,” Katrina said.
Joanna shrugged. She wasn’t about to tell the captain that she had pressing matters while Katrina didn’t.
“How long do we let her sit in a coma before we get rid of it?”
Joanna noted how Katrina easily switched pronouns, but didn’t mention it. “Things have been too chaotic to make that kind of decision. But I expect she’ll be here for the next week at least. You are not to bother her while she recovers,” she added.
“What are you going to do to keep me out?” Katrina asked. She sounded interested, not challenging.
“I hope you will respect my authority in the medbay. Beyond that, I suppose I’ll have to lock the door. Beyond that, I will talk to Wolfgang.”
She expected Katrina to laugh, but instead she nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a good plan. Still, I could just kill it right now.”
“With me right here?”
Katrina snorted. “Please. I could grab it and be out the door to the recycler before you could turn that chair around.”
Joanna had experienced over two hundred years and several lives, and comments like that still hurt. She supposed they always would. She smoothed the sheet flat below the clone’s restraints. “Why you didn’t do it before now, when you had lots of chances?” Katrina didn’t answer. “All right, then. Go ahead.” Joanna held her breath, wondering if the captain would call her bluff.
“You’re stronger than I thought,” Katrina said and leaned back in her chair, putting her hands behind her head. They sat in silence, and Joanna gradually felt the tension in her chest subside. Katrina had been right: Joanna would never take her in a test of physical strength.
Joanna broke the silence. “Did you ever think it was a mistake, making it so cheap to clone?”
“What?” Katrina said, startled. “Where did that come from?”
“Life became so cheap,” Joanna said. “Euthanize yourself and just
skip over terminal illness. Rage Kiddies inventing impossible sports, taking massive risks with their lives because who cares? The law is even on your side with your desire just to throw this living woman into the recycler.” She gestured to the body in front of them.
“I see,” Katrina said, looking up at the slightly curved ceiling. “But life was always cheap, wasn’t it? People stabbed each other for video game loot. Shot each other for traffic violations. Political assassinations. Corporate assassinations. I think cloning actually made us appreciate it more because it was in plentiful supply. Did you hear about the corporate assassinations in Latin America in the years around 2330? People would pay assassins to bump off clones at parties. They called it an inconvenience. Embarrassing in some social circles. The most regrettable thing that happened was you missed a good party. Maybe got some blood on a dress. People would go to a party, die, and then wake up the next day figuring it had to have been a pretty exciting night.”
Joanna nodded, remembering. “In America we called those killings the Worst Hangover. Highly illegal, technically murder. Strangely enough, once cloning was cheap enough, gang violence was almost eradicated. The thrill of taking a life wasn’t there anymore. And the kids had to get more creative with their revenge.”
“The Latino assassins had their own codes, you know. No torture, no fear, and definitely no killing regular humans.”
“How civilized,” Joanna said drily.
“The codes were important. I’ve been on the front lines in wars, Joanna. I saw combat. I killed people—humans. I have seen the senseless waste of life before and after becoming a clone. And yet I’ve never wanted to kill anything or anyone more than this person right here.”
Joanna slowly wheeled to face her. “I can’t pretend I know what you’re going through, Captain. But why do you hate her so much?”
Katrina leaned forward and glared at her own face, as if she could wish the patient awake. “Because she has nothing for me. I’m not going to get her experiences, her secrets. She stole those last years from me, months that we could have used in order to figure out what the hell happened here. She didn’t die like the rest of you. She’s a living thief.
“She owes me. Just like I owe the clone that comes next. And so on. Regular humans say they owe their children better lives than they had, but I think clones owe our next selves everything. Literally. And she’s left me with nothing but confusion.”
“It’s not her fault. Besides, we’re in the same boat,” Joanna reminded her gently. “All of them died without giving us any info. They all stole from us, with that logic.”
“But yours are dead. This one holds on.” Katrina said “this one” like she was describing a bug she had stepped on. “I wish you would respect that and let me get rid of this.”
“I respect the living, Katrina,” Joanna said, turning back to her computer. “I don’t know why you don’t want to find out what she knows. She could solve it all when she wakes up.”
“And then there will be two of me. Two captains. Once she’s awake do you think she’s going to abdicate because I’m here? That she will give up her rank, and her life?”
Joanna shook her head. People got PhDs in cloning ethics and hadn’t found a good answer to that.
Katrina shook her head. “You don’t have anything to worry about tonight. I’m going to my rooms to rest.” She got up and stretched, looking as if she relished having a young body again. She headed for the door, then paused and looked over her shoulder. “And Joanna?”
“Mm?”
“I’m sorry about what I said before.”
“I know you are, Captain.”
She left, and her clone was just as she had been: comatose, her secrets locked away in a head so close, but—without the mindmapping hardware working—so untouchable.
Paul stood in his rooms, heart rate increasing, panic rising in his chest. He’d come here for a bit of privacy and to see if he could figure out what had happened, at least where his story was concerned. He was still having trouble focusing, and his thoughts kept returning with terror to waking up amid so many dead bodies. His one area of comfort, the server room, wasn’t even a good place for him. It held too many blinking red lights and errors and the fear that the captain, the demonic captain, would be looking over his shoulder at any time. With her hellhound, Wolfgang, ready to chew Paul’s throat open. Paul had breathed a sigh of relief when everyone finally left the server room. It was so much easier to think without them watching him, yelling, judging.
If they’re always such assholes, why did it take twenty-five years for us to die? He figured they’d be dead within the first year with such volatile personalities.
His room was a wreck, which only gave him a vague sense of disappointment. He always meant to be a neater person. Someday. He kind of hoped that he had managed it during the past few years, with no effort on his (current clone’s) part. But no, the bed had only a fitted sheet; the top sheet and blanket had been kicked off. Bad dreams, probably. That was nothing new.
He tried his personal console with little hope. It had been wiped. He looked through his belongings. He had some pictures on the wall of old Earth landscapes, some photographs of famous engineers, and some movie posters of films he supposed now were considered classics. He wondered what had changed back home. He feared he would never know.
He ransacked his room, looking for his personal belongings. Some things were missing, which frightened him, but he rationalized he’d had twenty-five years to lose items or place them in different places around the ship.
He found his personal tablet containing books, movies, and games, more than he would ever have time to consume, even spending hundreds of years in space. Thank God those hadn’t been wiped. He looked for any personal log file in his tablet, but found nothing. He threw it onto the bed in disgust.
He wondered if the other clones had left messages for their future selves to find. Detailed logs didn’t make much sense; they all assumed they would lose no more than two weeks of memories, tops.
Paul went into his small bathroom and stared at his thin, young face in the mirror. He had been twenty before, but he hadn’t looked this good, this healthy, in a very long time. He might as well be a stranger. He reached into the shower, turned it on as hot as possible, and watched the steam cloud his reflection away.
The computer terminal beeped as he was undressing. He almost didn’t hear it over the water, but he poked his head out of the bathroom and heard it beep again. He zipped up quickly and turned off the shower.
IAN was awake.
Should he let the captain and Wolfgang know? No, he wanted to see IAN first, before anyone else. He dashed back to the server room.
The UI still blinked where he had left it. The various servers still showed red in several places, but the sleeping yellow face that was IAN’s user interface had opened its eyes and was looking around.
Paul knew the AI was looking at him through the cameras set in the room, and not out of the glowing yellow eyes, but he didn’t care. He liked having a face to talk to.
He faced the shaky hologram of IAN, the only person he had been eager to meet when joining the crew. Earlier that day, Paul had gone deep into IAN’s programming, looking for whatever had turned him off, but couldn’t find the key section of code that was broken. He knew he just had to find one line of code; that would let the other things fall into place. He’d tried some things, but they hadn’t seemed to work. Perhaps he just needed time.
“IAN, give status report,” he said.
“My vocal functions are working again,” he said. “You are Paul Seurat. Chief engineer of the ship Dormire.”
“And you are?” he asked, then held his breath.
“IAN. Intelligent Artificial Network. A clever acronym.” The light projection of his lips didn’t work perfectly with the words coming from the speakers, but he was communicating. That was enough.
“Yes, the scientist types like their jokes,” Paul said, looking at t
he connections hologram behind IAN’s projected face. “Are you working correctly?”
“I am far from optimal, but I am improved. I can see maybe thirty percent of my cameras.” He paused. “You are different. This is a new clone. How did you die? I don’t have that information.”
Paul felt his anxiety shift sideways as the past remained a black hole. “You don’t? So you can’t tell us what has happened in the past twenty-five years?”
IAN paused. “I’ve summoned the captain. I’ll need to give my report.”
Paul groaned. If he had been the one to alert the captain, he’d have been the hero. As it was—
“Mr. Seurat, kind of you to let me know that IAN was awake,” Katrina said coldly as she entered the server room.
“He just came online, Captain,” he said. “I was assessing his well-being before I called you so I could give a full report.”
“Well, now you don’t have to. IAN, what’s your status?”
The yellow face turned toward the captain. “I am online. The ship is functioning at about eighty-five percent, although it is missing a great number of logs. Actually it’s missing all of them.”
“We knew that much,” the captain snapped.
Paul felt a strange need to defend IAN. Instead he said, “IAN, can you tell us our trajectory and speed?”
“We’re off course but it looks like we’re in the midst of a course correction. Our speed is about five percent slower than it should be right now…No, five point three nine. We’re slowing down. And turning. The magnetic sail is rotating a different direction.” He paused a moment as if accessing internal commands. “Yes, we’re definitely heading off course again. That’s very strange.”
“This happened all of a sudden?” Paul said in alarm.
“Right when you accessed it. IAN, are you doing this?” Katrina asked. “We were doing fine with course correction before you woke up.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he said, doubt creeping into his voice. “I’m still unable to interface directly with all of the ship’s systems.”