Daisy's Run

by Scott Baron

  “I see where you’re coming from, but, technically, he does breathe; it’s just a minimal amount, is all. All cyborgs have to keep their flesh oxygenated and alive, and that means intake of oxygen through respiration, and yes, even some food.”

  “Maybe,” she relented, “but it’s still creepy as fuck.”

  “He’s not so bad. You just need to give him a chance.”

  “Unless he’s going to tell me who the other cyborg is, I’ll pass, thanks.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Three days to Earth, and Daisy was no closer to figuring out who among the others was not human. She couldn’t very well go around probing and groping the crew—with the exception of Vince, of course—while trying to feel for a pulse, or lack thereof. Worse yet, having conspicuously exposed artificial parts did not preclude anyone from suspicion.

  She had sat for hours upon hours, ensconced in the privacy of her quarters, scanning through the minimally secured crew files she’d been able to access. It seemed the coding tricks she’d learned for Vince’s birthday surprise were having real-world applications she hadn’t expected. Unfortunately, the files were all normal.

  Too normal. As if someone had crafted them to read just the way they would be expected to if someone were to gain unauthorized access and dig through them.

  With few leads to go on, Daisy found herself antsy, resigned to wandering the ship in her off-time, thinking as she moved. Running scenarios through her head. Trying to get a grasp on the bigger picture.

  It comes back to Mal, most likely, she thought. And Sarah’s accident. She shuddered at the thought. What if it wasn’t an accident? What if she was getting too close to something? I mean, this could potentially put the entire Dark Side base at risk.

  Daisy felt her mind spin. The implications were incredible. Are the AI trying to take over? she found herself wondering.

  “This is ridiculous,” she muttered to herself. “But what if—”

  “Do you need any assistance, Daisy?” Mal asked. “Your blood pressure seems rather high.”

  “She’s always keeping tabs on you, ya know. You need to go somewhere she can’t scan,” Sarah’s voice whispered in her head. Somehow, Daisy’s internal manifestation of her dead friend seemed to have gained strength since she nearly fried her brain.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said out loud.

  “You know what, Daisy?” Mal asked.

  Shit.

  “Nothing. I was just talking to myself. Thanks for checking in, Mal, but I’m fine.” Daisy forced herself to walk normally, but she also focused on the lesson Sarah had taught her.

  One, two, three… She tried to sense her heartbeat.

  “That’s it, Daze, just like we practiced,” Sarah’s voice encouraged.

  Four, five… Slowly, she began to feel her pulse and breathing fall under her control. Six, seven, eight…

  It was one of Sarah’s little centering tricks. A simple thing, really, but one that Daisy had found she was actually pretty good at, even before she decided to embrace a handful of neuro-stim-implanted techniques. Once those additions had taken hold, her control had only improved.

  “I must have suffered a scanning error, Daisy. Your blood pressure appears to be perfectly normal. Perhaps even a little on the low side. Might I suggest adding more salt to your next meal?”

  “Thanks, Mal,” she replied, not losing count in her head. “I’ll remember that at dinner.”

  “A good idea. I will also ask Barry to bring some sodium tablets by your quarters later. Proper electrolyte balance is of the utmost importance.”

  Daisy kept walking, quietly counting in her head.

  “I know where you’re going,” Sarah’s disembodied voice mused. “I thought you hated that place.”

  “I do, but you loved it,” she replied, keeping the discourse internal this time, away from Mal’s ever-listening ears.

  “So sentimental. What have you done with that sarcastic girl I know and love? Are you sure you’re the real Daisy?”

  “Very funny coming from my imaginary friend,” she replied silently. “But there’s another reason. The scanners in there are still offline.”

  Daisy felt the nausea rise in her throat.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

  Floating weightless in the empty space of Starboard Nine was making her stomach flip-flop, as usual, but Daisy redoubled her efforts, focusing her breathing, concentrating on the tasks at hand—namely, keeping her body calm, figuring out how to weed out the hidden cyborg in their crew, and, of course, not barfing in zero-g.

  She used a tether line to help anchor her in the gravity-free room, then let herself unwind, closing her eyes in the dimly-lit compartment. As she focused on breathing, relaxing her body as she did, a surprising thing happened. The nausea that plagued her whenever she visited that pod was a little different in her mind. It became something tangible. Something she had control over. Gently, she wrapped her mind around the discomfort and squeezed it down, compressing the ill-feeling into a tiny sliver of itself until it subsided completely.

  Cool!

  Daisy opened her eyes slowly. Direction was no longer an issue. Up and down, forward and back, nothing mattered but where she intended to be. The notion finally clicked, and just like that, she was as comfortable as an otter swimming in the sea, with every direction at her disposal. She tugged the tether, sending herself toward the bulkhead. Just as she was about to make contact, she flipped her body around, landing feet-first and pushing off at an angle.

  She used a little too much force, which sent her flying to the opposite wall a bit too fast, but with another mid-flight twist, she shifted her impact and again pushed off in a different direction. This time the rebound was better.

  This is awesome!

  “Told you so,” her dead friend approved.

  Daisy spent the better part of a half hour experimenting with zero-g flight without the burden of an EVA suit. It was everything Sarah had said it could be.

  I finally see what you meant, Sarah. I wish I’d listened when you were still alive.

  The voice in her head remained silent.

  Eventually Daisy drifted to the center of the pod again and allowed herself to become still. There was a problem to work through, and after unwinding with a little relaxing fun, she felt refreshed and ready for the challenge.

  Interestingly, she found that while she’d been playing in the weightless environment, her subconscious had been busily working away at the dual problems of tracking down that problematic air leak, as well as the more troubling issue of there being an additional cyborg hidden among the crew.

  Much like the medical scanner she’d reassembled on auto pilot without consciously thinking about it, or the odd little plasma cascade device she’d created while ‘in the zone,’ which she’d been tinkering with ever since, this solution to her new problem came to her without her even realizing it. And interestingly, it involved that very same piece of medical equipment.

  It seemed that, like those hidden-image pictures, things were coming to her much easier now that she’d learned that all she needed was to shift her perspective in order to see them. Unfocus and the big picture becomes clear.

  If I strip it out of the massive housing, the key bits will easily fit, she thought. And it aligns with what I was already doing so perfectly.

  A cheerful smile blossomed alongside the idea.

  She finally had a plan.

  Daisy had been putting together a sensor array in the airlocks between pods to gauge pressure changes from one section to the next, hoping to pinpoint the culprit. It was tedious work, and her installations occasionally irritated crewmembers, as they were forced to go around through a different set of airlock doors while she ratcheted all of the pieces into place, but everyone accepted it as part of her daily routine. More importantly, it was a routine that the captain had ordered her to do.

  The installations were a part of her duties as the ship’s technical expert, and a hu
ge thing working in her favor was that no one else really knew what exactly her sensors were doing. Barry might spot something obviously not aimed at gauging the air volume, but adding a stripped-down body scan array from the parts at her disposal shouldn’t be too difficult, and she could easily hide them in the existing design. No one would know the difference.

  The only potential issue she could envision was that she needed the crew to stay in one place for her scan to run. It would take several seconds, but that was the beauty of her plan. While they stood in the airlock space between the doors as they waited for them to cycle, that would provide the machine plenty of time to do a quick scan and gather the data she needed.

  Unfortunately, she couldn’t leave a readout tablet attached to the unit, lest people see what she was up to, so she modified one of the partially damaged units on her workbench to act as a pure receiver only. It took a bit of re-wiring to alter its inputs, but in the end, she managed to configure it to communicate directly with the scanner, but without any connectivity to Mal. The information from the scanner could be directly sent back to that unit alone, and would be totally partitioned from the mysterious AI’s prying eyes.

  It was somewhat rudimentary—she only had so many pieces she could cannibalize for the device, after all—but after several hours hunched over circuit boards with a soldering gun in her workspace, she had a fully-functioning, and fully-camouflaged body scanner. The problem was, she only had enough parts to make one.

  Now, where to put it?

  The galley’s main entryway, she eventually decided.

  It was the most logical place to install the device, as most of the time the crew used the entrance from the common passageway. Rarely did they enter via the connecting pod doors adjacent at either end. With only three doors, she had a thirty-three percent chance of getting the crew as they gathered for their meals, if you went by pure math. Taking into consideration the habits the crew had formed when coming to chow, she gave herself a solid seventy percent.

  Daisy hauled the contraption to the galley and cycled the passageway door open, then heaved the curved, composite housing into the space and began removing the mounting bolts lining the walls. She’d replace them soon enough, and with them, the scanner would be in place, running from just below knee level, hugging the wall as it passed across the top of the small chamber.

  “Shit, sorry, Daisy, didn’t know you’d be putting that in here,” Reggie said as he stepped into the somewhat cramped space.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. Captain’s on me to find that pressure leak, so I’m setting up down here next. Sorry about the inconvenience. It’ll be mounted in ten minutes.”

  “No worries. I just wanted to grab a little snack before lunch. I’ll circle around to botanical and pop in through from there. I should probably say hi to Tamara anyway and thank her. She took a special request and grew me some purple carrots.”

  “What’s so special about that?”

  “Nothing. I just like them, is all. Anyway, she humored me and grew a few bunches. She’s really not so bad once you get past that gruff botanist façade.”

  “Well, save me a carrot, then. I’ll be in, in a few minutes.”

  “Will do.”

  Reggie stepped back out into the passageway and made his way around the long way. Less than ten minutes later, Daisy completed the installation, powered on the device, and waited for it to charge.

  A design constraint had been the unit’s power consumption. Scanning a body took huge amounts of energy, but Mal would immediately notice a power draw of that magnitude. Daisy had finally worked around the issue when an inspiration hit her. It had to do with the neuro-stim, the way the device itself worked.

  Simple, she thought. By drips.

  Like the neuro-stim filled a mind with data, she structured her scanner to charge the same way. Rather than one big cable feeding the unit, the housing now contained scores of portable batteries, daisy-chained together and tied to a trickle charger. To Mal, it would just look like a constant low-level pressure-measuring device pulling power, but in reality, the machine would slowly build enough stored energy for a self-powered, and totally covert, scan.

  She figured the machine was likely operational when the captain passed through the device a few hours later. He had been followed a few minutes later by Tamara, who paused to examine the strange contraption mounted between the heavy airlock doors, but, unfortunately, remained unscanned as the machine needed over an hour before it could capture another image.

  One is better than none, she thought.

  A short while later, Daisy casually strolled back to her quarters, munching on a purple carrot Reggie had saved for her. As soon as her door closed behind her, she excitedly powered on the readout tablet. She had been correct, only one scan had been sent to the device, and the captain, as expected, was human. His entire left leg from the hip down was cybernetic, and while she couldn’t achieve the resolution to pinpoint what had been his exact injury, she could, however, see where the junction between bone and metal was slowly breaking down. It wasn’t an alloy or a servo issue, but a flesh & bone one.

  Wow, sorry, Captain. That’s got to be getting painful.

  Daisy noticed several other anomalies in his scan. Internal scar tissue everywhere, and lots of it. At some point, it seemed, Captain Harkaway had undergone some incredibly invasive procedures throughout much of his body. It was a miracle he wasn’t perpetually crotchety, given what he must have gone through.

  By the end of the afternoon, Gustavo and Reggie were added to her growing database, though it had taken a bit of wrangling to keep Finn from messing things up and walking through the doorway, draining the charge on a useless scan while she waited for Gus to head back to Command after dinner. Daisy had been forced to use the only trick she had at her disposal, and it really wasn’t much in the way of tricks when you got right down to it. More like a dare, if you could dare yourself, that is. In any case, it was right up Finn’s alley, and that was all that mattered.

  Finnegan had one weakness aside from food, and Daisy intended to use it to her full advantage.

  “Hey, Finn,” she called out when he headed toward the door that she’d just spent the better part of the hour watching recharge. “Come here for a minute.”

  Gus was finishing his meal, and provided he didn’t go back for seconds, or heaven help her, dessert, he’d be exiting soon. Likely less than five minutes, if her estimate was correct.

  “Yeah, Daisy, what’s up?” the metal-fingered chef asked.

  “I wanna show you something. A game I learned the other day.”

  “Daisy, I really should go clean up. How about tomorrow?”

  He turned and started for the door.

  “It’s got knives.”

  Finn stopped in his tracks, slowly turning with an impish grin on his face.

  “Oh, reeeeally? Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  “I just did. Bring me your cutting board. And a knife.”

  Finnegan was intrigued, and despite having so recently had a run-in with the wrong end of a very sharp bit of cutlery, his love of all things bladed hadn’t diminished in the least.

  He placed the cutting board and a medium-sized chef’s knife in front of her on the table.

  “Okay, so color me intrigued, Daisy. What sort of game needs a cutting board and a knife?”

  “You a fan of Aliens?” she asked.

  “What, like little green men in UFOs? Is this going to be some stupid joke, Daisy?”

  She slapped her hand down on the board, fingers spread wide.

  “Not a joke at all, Finn,” she said, looking him in the eye.

  Something in the way she smiled made him ever so slightly uncomfortable.

  Daisy picked up the knife in a stabbing grip and rested the point on the cutting board, between her thumb and index finger.

  “Uh, what are you doing, Daisy?”

  “I told you, it’s a game.” Her eyes darted to Gus as he began gathering his
dishes.

  “I don’t think I want to play this game,” Finn said. “Maybe we should just put that back in the kitchen, okay?”

  Daisy took a deep breath and focused. It was getting easier every time she did it, she found. The focusing was becoming second nature, and the pattern formed by her spread fingers made geometric figures flicker behind her eyes. It was just simple mathematics.

  She started stabbing the board. Slowly at first, the knife traveling from left to right between her fingers as she went. Horrified but fascinated, Finn couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  Faster and faster, the knife thunked into the spaces between her fingers, coming so close, but leaving her flesh unharmed. Soon her knife-wielding hand was a blur of speed. She was in the groove and in total control. She couldn’t miss, and Finn was enthralled.

  Daisy broke her concentration for a split second and allowed herself a little smile as she saw Gus finally head for the door from the corner of her eye.

  “Ouch!”

  A small blossom of red dotted the cutting board beneath her nicked thumb.

  “Shit, Daisy, now I’ve got to wash that again,” Finn whined, but behind the words, she could see he thought that was ridiculously cool. As her metal-fingered friend gathered up the knife and board, Gus stepped into the double door and sealed it behind him.

  Finally!

  “You know something? You’re nuts, Daisy. But you’re my kind of nuts,” Finn said with a laugh. “I mean, I already have metal fingers. Is this just your way of saying you’re jealous and want some too?”

  “Not on your life. I like my bits just like they are. One hundred percent human. Catch ya later, Finn.”

  “Yeah, yeah. See ya, crazy girl.”

  Daisy made her way back to her pod thinking about what she’d said to Finn.

  One hundred percent human.

  She looked at her bandaged finger and had a flash of doubt.

  It didn’t cut deep enough to hit bone, she reluctantly admitted to herself. And there’ve been rumors of AIs who don’t even know they’re artificial. But, no, there’s no way I could be one. I bled more than a skin-job would, didn’t I? And besides, she placed her fingers on her neck. Thump-thump, thump-thump. Daisy smiled and relaxed. Cyborgs don’t have a pulse.