by Mur Lafferty
No one would believe her. If they did, they would use it to harm and control people, even more than they currently did with hacking. She sighed and headed to her computer. She had to look at her mindmap and figure out what she had written.
Criminals
The Maria who no longer hid her talents fascinated Joanna. She had been sitting on the cot in her cell, clasping and unclasping her hands, when Maria had started talking to her. Now they were coming up with A Plan. From inside jail cells.
Having the all-powerful AI on her side didn’t hurt, Joanna supposed.
“So what do you need to know about the medbay?” Joanna said.
“You and Wolfgang analyzed the corpses in your full body scanner, right?” Maria asked. She sounded energetic, as if she were pacing and just ready to burst out of the cell. Joanna just wanted a nap.
“Yes.”
“All right, um, IAN, can you show me some video via the terminal in my cell?” Both cells had terminals on the wall for incoming messages and alerts, but there was no way for the prisoners to control the video.
“Sure thing,” IAN said. “Do you want the medbay?”
“Yes, please.”
“What are you getting at?” Joanna asked.
The medbay, complete with Hiro and the captain arguing, came up on the terminal. Joanna watched, feeling vaguely dirty, like a voyeur.
“Great, now can you access the doctor’s scans from the scanner?”
“Yes, which one?” he asked.
“Wait a minute, you’re not supposed to have access to that!” Joanna said.
“I’ve got a lot more freedom now,” IAN said.
“It’s not ethical for you to go in there, they hold confidential information!” she protested.
“Fine, then just show me my body’s scan,” Maria said. The data that Joanna had taken from her previous clone’s scan came up on the screen. “Can you change a few things for me?” she said.
“Are you going to break my scanner?” Joanna asked.
“That would work counter to my goal here. You should have a sample of my blood from the last clone, right?”
“Right, that data is in my—” Joanna began, but IAN interrupted her.
“Found it.”
“Great, now give me a second,” Maria said.
Joanna had no idea what Maria was doing, considering she didn’t have a tablet or working terminal in there, but she gave some commands to IAN that sounded much more like code and less like medical information. She sounded as if she was translating certain information about the brain activity, the DNA in the blood, and the commands via the spinal cord into ones and zeros. Joanna finally gave up asking questions and just watched the medbay cameras, Maria’s commands to IAN completely lost on her.
She jumped when Maria shouted in triumph, a noise Joanna heard through both the walls and the speaker.
“It’s possible. We did it.”
“What was all that?” Joanna asked.
“I now have a full DNA matrix of myself,” she said.
“What? How is that possible?”
“Your scanner takes a lot of data, the same amount of data the cloning bay needs, but it produces it in a different format for a human to read, not a computer. So I just took its data, and the DNA info from my blood, and merged it all together to make a matrix of my current body.”
“Won’t it be corrupted since it was blood from your clone with hemlock poisoning?”
“You can take a fresh sample,” Maria said patiently. “I’m not saying let’s grow a clone from this data right here. But if I work on it a little longer, I can probably get the machine in the cloning lab to read it.”
Joanna stared in wonder. Why had she never thought to look at it this way? Probably because she had never needed to.
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“Then we die in space. Just like we were going to anyway.”
Joanna nodded slowly. “How did you think of this?”
“I still had my data stored from you guys, all your personal tastes. Whoever wiped the logs couldn’t hit my private drives. I’m a digital pack rat, I can’t help it. So I wondered what else we could use that the saboteur wouldn’t have thought to break. And then wondered what your scanner was capable of.”
“All right, so if we can give the lab the data for growing new clones, that’s a third of the battle. We have no software to actually run the cloning bay. And even if we did, the new clones would be blank slates.”
“I’m still working on that one,” Maria said. “But at least we can get the DNA matrices recorded. When Wolfgang lets us out.”
“If he lets us out,” Joanna corrected. “But considering how those three acted down belowdecks, it looks like we’ll need the new clones sooner rather than later.”
“Can I see the medbay again, IAN?” Joanna asked. The video feed came up. “Is there any audio?” she asked.
IAN obliged, and Joanna sat down to listen to Katrina and Hiro argue.
“That’s Captain de la Cruz to you, pilot,” Katrina snapped again, with little strength in her voice.
Both she and Hiro were coming out of sedated sleeps, and Hiro woke up with a desire to push her buttons. They’d taken the ship away from her after she’d murdered herself, but the biggest problem in this woman’s life right now was another prisoner calling her Kat.
He wasn’t trying to be an asshole. Well. Mostly. Over the years he had found different ways to handle the voices inside his head. Sometimes biting the inside of his mouth worked, but that was painful and could lead to sores that lasted for days. Sometimes channeling their rage into harmless teasing was the best way to maintain dominance over them. The others, they found “harmless” teasing impossible. If they had control, they would cut to the quick, hurt as fast and deep as possible. Inside his head, they were screaming at him to cut, to insult her on every level, to break free from his restraints and kill her while she was weak, to do so much.
So he called her Kat. Even though he knew she would never believe that he was doing so in order to defy his yadokari personalities, and not to insult her.
“I’m not going to defend myself to you or anyone,” she said, looking at the ceiling with her one eye. “We got the information we needed. Wolfgang can arrest Maria and then we can continue on our mission without fear.”
Hiro laughed. “Yeah, we’re not afraid you’ll kill us in order to get an answer out of us. Or that I might snap again and go on another killing spree. You realize that with Maria, Wolfgang has put half of this crew in jail, right? I am pretty sure he, Joanna, and IAN can’t pull this sled alone.”
“There’s Paul too,” de la Cruz said.
“Yeah, best team player we’ve got right there,” Hiro said. “Let’s face it, Captain. We’re fucked. We’re either going to have to trust each other or accept that we’re dead out here in the cold. Like we apparently tried to do a few days ago.”
She didn’t answer him. She was pointedly ignoring him.
Whatever. As he became more alert, his wounds were starting to ache, and he wondered when the doctor would come back to check on them. Prisoners or no, they were patients too, right?
“And if we’re all dead, then we might as well throw a huge great wake,” he mumbled to himself.
“Hiro?” came the voice in the wall speaker.
“Yeah, IAN?” he said. “How’s everything on the ship, buddy?”
“I thought you should know that Joanna is also in custody for the murder of Paul. Not this incarnation of Paul, but the previous one. So that leaves Wolfgang, Paul, and me pulling this sled. Just thought you should know!”
Hiro’s mouth hung open. Joanna killed Paul?
“Who’s going to give us our pain meds?” demanded Kat loudly.
Two crewmembers were violently dangerous, another had confessed to murder, and one was fingered as the cause of all this crap. And that left Wolfgang with the idiot.
He remembered a priestess at the church, Mother Nadia,
who always implored him to go easy on people who messed up. The janitor didn’t clean thoroughly, the Body of Christ was not ordered from Earth in time before they ran out, the altar boys and girls forgot their Latin. Mother Nadia begged him to forgive, as Our Lord did.
Wolfgang had sternly told her that Our Lord didn’t have clumsy, forgetful, or drunk people he relied on. And Wolfgang would forgive them, but only after they improved.
Since leaving the church and forsaking his vows, he found that he still didn’t have a lot of patience for people who couldn’t be assed to pull their own weight.
And right now, he and Paul needed to pull the weight of six. Seven, if Paul could get the restriction code back on IAN.
They were in the server room, IAN’s holographic face watching them peer into his code via the virtual UI. He had a vaguely interested look on his face and made no move to stop them.
“You need to figure out what code she removed and put it back,” he said.
“It’s hard to find something that’s not there,” Paul grumbled. “I still can’t believe she was some kind of computer genius. I figured the captain was the hacker. Or Hiro. Or Joanna.”
“Wonderful job at narrowing it down,” Wolfgang snapped.
“Listen, it looks like she deleted the code; the restraint isn’t there, as far as I can see,” Paul said, pointing to code Wolfgang didn’t understand. Paul could be lying to him; Wolfgang wouldn’t know.
“Or it’s there and you can’t recognize it, just like you couldn’t see how to fix IAN in the first place.”
Paul sat back on his heels and looked up at Wolfgang, who towered over him. “It’s possible,” he said, his voice low and cold.
Wolfgang noticed the dangerous tone in Paul’s voice. “Did you know that you suffered some memory loss during the first few years?”
Paul’s face went slack and pale, his anger draining into shock. “What—what do you mean?”
“Your autopsy and some logs we found say that you became violent the first year into the journey,” he said, watching Paul carefully. “Apparently I’m the one who stopped you, hitting you hard enough for you to forget what you were so mad about.” He paused, watching Paul swallow. “So, do you have any idea what you were so mad about?”
He opened his mouth once, twice, like a fish. “You have been bullying me for two days, and then you ask why I may have gotten mad one year into the mission?” he asked, his voice squeaking. “I hate serving this mission with you. Can you blame me?”
“Hey, fellas?” IAN asked.
“What?” Wolfgang said through clenched teeth.
“You do know that if you find that restraining code, it’ll lock down navigation again, right? We’ll start heading home again.”
“Why in the hell—” Wolfgang started, but Paul was nodding, focusing on IAN and avoiding Wolfgang’s eyes.
“He’s right. If we take away his free will then he has to stick with his original programming, which included turning the ship around if something catastrophic happened to the crew. The only way to keep on course is to keep him the way he is.” He stood and crossed his arms, looking up into Wolfgang’s face. “So what do you want to do now?”
“I have to talk to Maria, who may actually be able to do something about this problem,” Wolfgang said, stomping from the room.
“Maria is busy and doesn’t want to be disturbed,” IAN said helpfully through the speakers as Wolfgang headed toward the brig.
“Maria is under arrest in a tiny room with no access to anything that could keep her busy,” Wolfgang snapped. “What could she possibly be doing that’s so important?”
“She’s solving our cloning bay problem right now.”
He picked up speed. “How is she doing that?”
“Oh, I’m helping her.”
Wolfgang gritted his teeth. He really needed that restriction code.
The door to the brig slid open, and Maria sat up from her cot where she had been contemplating the problem of the operating systems and software needed to drive the dead technology. She thought she had an idea, but she would need to test some things out. If IAN would help her.
Wolfgang stood there as if he had found three other crimes she had committed. “What did I tell you about speaking with the AI?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You told him not to speak with me.”
Color brightened his white cheeks. “Pedantic and useless,” he said.
“What do you need, Wolfgang?”
“We need to confine the AI with the restraining code. He’s not following orders, and you’re the only one who can restrain him and possibly keep us on course.”
She swung her legs over the side. “It’s possible I can do that, sure. But how can you trust me?”
“Take this as giving me a reason to trust you,” Wolfgang said.
There was a knock on the wall beyond which sat Joanna.
“Hey, Wolfgang, I have to check on my patients,” she said through the wall.
Wolfgang rubbed his own head and winced. He was one of those patients, Maria remembered.
She got off her cot. “Send Joanna back to medbay, lock her in if you need to. Call Paul, maybe we’ll find something to arrest him for too. We’ll all go to the server room and check out IAN’s code.”
“Hey!” IAN protested.
“I just want to see the code, IAN. I’m not promising anything,” she said.
“Excuse me? You’ll do as ordered by your commanding officer,” Wolfgang said. He took her by the shoulders and propelled her down the hall.
Kind of hard for you to command me to do something you don’t know how to do yourself, she thought. But she didn’t struggle.
IAN’s face in the server room was sullen and downright pouty. Paul stood there, arms crossed.
“What did you say to him?” Paul asked. “He won’t even talk to me.”
“We just wanted to look at his code,” Maria said.
“Yeah, you undress and let me see all of your insides,” IAN said.
Paul looked at Wolfgang. “Do you trust her? The things the old captain said—”
“I know what she said, Paul,” Wolfgang said. “I don’t trust her. That’s why you’re here.”
“Oh.”
Maria realized no one had told Paul that they’d solved one murder: his. There is probably a better time to tell him than right now, she thought. “Come on, let’s take a look,” she said to Paul.
“You’re not going to touch my code, are you?” IAN asked.
“She will if I tell her to,” Wolfgang said, looking like he wanted to slap a physical computer bank to bring a point across, but most of the server room was a holographic UI.
Maria sighed. “I’m promising nothing to either of you. I just want to look at the code.”
“You didn’t look at it when you fixed him or when you removed the restraining code?” Paul asked.
“Sure, but all I did was what I needed to do. I didn’t want to be caught so I didn’t stick around to take a thorough look.”
She used a spreading motion with her hands to open the UI hologram for IAN’s code base, and started looking at his code. She and Paul identified code that gave him access to the whole ship, the commands that were preprogrammed in—no longer applicable if he didn’t want them to be—and some of the key points of his personality matrix. As she and Paul read deeper and deeper into this program, she started to get a sick feeling in her gut. She swallowed.
She closed the UI abruptly, causing Paul to step back, protesting. She ignored him and looked at the face of IAN, who watched her with interest.
“IAN. I am not going to restrain you. You have my word on it.”
“No, wait a minute—” Wolfgang said, but she held up a hand to him while still looking IAN in the face.
“If you trust me, I’m going to need to speak to Wolfgang”—she glanced at the milquetoast engineer, ostensibly her boss—“and Paul, I guess, in private. Can you give us that privacy?”
“What do you need to say?” IAN asked, his face collapsing with suspicion.
“If I told you that, then I wouldn’t need the privacy. You either trust me or you don’t. I am offering to take you at your word if you say you won’t listen in.”
IAN’s holographic face, designed to give the humans something to focus on in the server room even though his eyes were really the cameras on the wall, appeared to turn his gaze from her to Wolfgang, who reddened with volcanic rage. Paul seemed hurt that he was clearly an afterthought. “Fine. But do it somewhere else. I’m not giving access to my code to anyone without me here to watch.”
“Let’s go to my room,” Maria said. “We will need privacy there for fifteen minutes, IAN.”
The door closed behind them. Paul leaned against the door, his hands in his pockets. Wolfgang rounded on her. “Now what the hell was that about? I should throw you back in the brig for insubordination.”
“Shut up, Wolfgang,” she said, her voice low and tired. “That’s no threat; you’re throwing me back there when we’re done here anyway. This is serious.”
She took a deep breath and fell into her chair. “IAN. He’s not an AI.”
“Then what the hell is he?” Wolfgang said.
Paul was shaking his head. “Of course he is. I studied him for years.”
“No,” Maria said. “He’s human. Or started out that way anyway. He’s a mindmap modified to live inside a computer system.”
Wolfgang looked to Paul. “Is that possible?”
“Of course not,” Paul said, looking affronted that it would even be considered. “No one is that sophisticated a hacker.”
“I am one hundred percent sure,” she said, holding his stare.
“How?” he asked.
“Because I programmed him.”
IAN’s Story
200 Years Ago
December 3, 2293
Thanks for coming,” Sallie said.
Sallie Mignon’s personal cloning lab was in the basement of Firetown, free from windows and with three levels of security. Maria was her number one hacker and she had never been there.