by Wil McCarthy
Voiceover: ...We see the wardroom. Large enough to hold the entire crew, but only in null gravity. We've had two meetings here already, and it's an amusing sight. Gives you a stiff neck, too, looking around to see everyone. Captain Wallich is adamant about “face time,” though—important for morale and all that. Over on this end is the galley, with our beloved pap synthesizer.
Image: Galley, medium magnification; pap synthesizer at window center. Schematic enhance: wireframe rendering of toilet behind blue door, with plumbing leading to reclamation unit and thence to pap synthesizer. Hold one second. Image: restore previous. Image: Closeup on pap synthesizer, angle selected to emphasize familiar, kitchen-appliance look. APDX: Adjust pallette.
Voiceover: What can I say about nutrient pap? Utterly healthful and not quite tasteless, it's oatmeal's idiot cousin. Since we have no actual food aboard, we're building a fine, close relationship with this machine. Yum. I can't share the odor with you, alas, but Davenroy says it's mostly in my mind anyway. Or maybe she's just burned out her smell receptors leaning over those hot reactors all day.
Image: Pan back, pitch down 45 degrees. Rotate until green door is centered.
Voiceover: This is the shower, currently in use by our bioanalyst, Renata Baucum.
Baucum: Damn it, Strasheim, if that door comes open I'll
Voiceover: Already we're just like a family, I swear. Wallich will make me clean out the garbage disposal again if I keep this up! Actually, privacy is very important on a vessel this small, which is why I can't show you the crew quarters. We all need a place that's truly and uniquely ours, right? The tragic death of Tug Jinacio has left us with an extra berth, though, and we've started leaving the door open, treating the space like a kind of annex to the wardroom, named in his honor. The Jinacio Ballroom, yeah.
Image: Jinacio's berth. Image: Coffin. Image: Bunk bed. Image: Restore previous. APDX: Adjust pallette for lighting again. Mummy bag should be puke green, not gray—what is wrong with this hue filter?
Voiceover: As you can see, it's a bit tight and public for one-on-one conversation, but in the absence of anything better it serves well enough. This way, we can keep out of each other's berths entirely, which definitely seems to be a good thing; null gravity has a way of making the spaces bigger, but knees and elbows and especially voices shrink it right back down again. There is a temptation to use the berth for extra storage—even with our hurried departure, there's an awful lot of clutter and damn little room for it—but thus far we've resisted. Hooray for us.
Image: Pan back 2m, yaw 90 degrees left, roll 45 degrees right. Right through the hatchway, pause and freeze. Image: bridge; four chairs, two occupied. Image overlay: roving circular window, exterior view as per AFD51 (star field only, no enhancement). Text enhance: bridge workstations are less plastic in function—many more of the controls are built in and cannot be altered, since software glitches could otherwise present a threat during critical operations. The one exception is the captain's station at center right, which has built-in, touch-sentitive 3DI screens that can assume the form and function of any other bridge station, and some engine room functions as well. See technical specification for details.
Voiceover: Meet Tosca Lehne, our Immune system overseer, and of course Captain Wallich.
Wallich
APDX: more photogenic than I've been thinking. Look at him playing to the camera here! Work a bit more screen time for him in future. Well... hmm. Entertainment/information balance problem; what's my real responsibility here? Definite food for thought.
Image: closeup, Darren Wallich. Center that smile.
Voiceover: And how is everything going, sir? Any problems?
Wallich: Boredom and the threat of vacuum, ha ha. Nothing we can't handle. We're on a more or less sunward course right now, and should intercept the Floral asteroids in ten days. So far, the ship's performance has been nominal, meaning “good,” but then we haven't been asking very much of it. Which I suppose is also good. Air quality is at the top of my agenda right now; we've got six people eating nutrient pap in this can, and life support could probably do a better job of removing spare intestinal gas from the atmosphere. We'll tear the system down later and have a look at the percolation filters. Pretty exciting, right?
Image: restore previous.
Voiceover: And Lehne, how are things with you?
Lehne: Fine.
Voiceover: The ship's immune system behaving normally? No problems, no interesting observations?
Lehne: Nobody in here but us, Strasheim. Immune system masses about a milligram, all told, and isn't doing anything except sit there. Less than dust.
Voiceover: Well, that's the way we like it, I guess.
Image: Restore previous. Schematic enhance: show instrument panel projections, course ahead as two parallel dotted lines, curving slightly and converging in the distance, RANGE (AU, MKM) TO GANYMEDE odometer ticking slowly upward, RANGE (AU, MKM) TO SUN odometer ticking slowly down. Show sun icon to Wallich's right—circle 0.2 degrees wide, with yellow “rays” covering eight degrees in just-visible scintillation.
Voiceover: And there you have it. Short tour, yes, I know, but try living here. This is John Strasheim, Mycosystem Mission One correspondent aboard the Immune Ship Louis Pasteur, signing off for now. Good night, and sleep well.
—from Louis Pasteur, a “Walking” Tour
(c) 2106 by John Strasheim
NINE:
Shiptime
“Now turn the screw until it reaches full extension,” Wallich was telling me. “Like that, yeah, perfect. Easy as shoes, right? Ha ha.”
“Right,” I agreed as the screw came loose from its slot, though not, of course, from the metal panel cover itself. Wouldn't that be a wonder; a bridge full of loose, floating screws, and us all chasing after them? I repeated the operation five times, and in under a minute I had the cover off in my hands, like an empty box of strange design, missing a few walls and sporting holes in awkward places. It was made of silver, I think, though probably it was an alloy of some sort. Never a hint of tarnish.
Moving carefully, I pocketed my screwdriver, then set the cover in the bright orange safety of my chair and wrapped the restraint harness loosely around it to keep it from floating free. Where it had been, the guts of my instrument panel now hung out, gray and green and glittering, looking exactly as the insides of electronic devices had looked for decades untold. This by itself is significant, if you think about it: there had been no quantum leaps, had been in fact a regression of these technologies since the Evacuation, owing probably to a general mistrust of things too small to be seen. Blue-light microscopes were the instruments of choice in our bit shops back home, and even I knew about the strict lower limit that imposed on component size. Whatever gets us through our lives, I guess.
“Now we're going to remove the memory boards,” Wallich advised, “which will give us access to the main logic unit, or MLU, which we're also going to pull. Theoretically, we should have spares for all these parts, but of course those were never loaded, and I seriously doubt the Gladholders will have anything compatible, ha ha, but just the same we're going to clean and inspect every piece. I'm not above soldering a wire here or there to bypass a bad chip, so we may practice that as well.”
“Lucky us,” I said, activating and focusing the tiny work lamps on my zee-spec.
Wallich, drifting somewhere close behind me, laughed. “That's funny. That's really funny.”
“I think your sense of humor needs adjustment.”
But he just laughed at that one, too, so I went ahead and started pulling memory boards. They were about the size of debit cards, though a good deal stiffer and more fragile. I was careful, and my leg pockets soon bulged with them. I should mention, by the way, that I was upside-down to my workstation (i.e., rightside up to everyone else's), with my fee
t braced on the sides of the chair and my knees around its stem. Not the most comfortable position, but secure enough for this sort of delicate work. If you've operated much in null gravity, you'll know what I mean.
The work went slowly, but eventually I had uncovered the MLU, and was studying the clips and brackets that held it in place. One false move right now could doom this mission for good, but then, if dust or other assorted schmutz got inside here—or mycora, God forbid—or if there were some sort of fire or short circuit or name-your-favorite-accident, then not knowing my way around in here could doom us just as surely. Personally, my money was on leaving it the hell alone and taking our chances, but the decision, of course, was Wallich's, and he'd shown a strong propensity for making us dismantle things, clean things, inspect things to death and beyond. “You'll always have hardware anomalies out here,” he'd said to me several times these past few days, “but you never know what they're likely to be, and if you're going to be prepared for unknown problems, you have to know the ship.” Well, maybe, but I suspected it was also a way to keep everyone occupied and out of each other's hair.
“Here and here,” Wallich said to me now, leaning past me and pointing with his own screwdriver. “You're going to press these tabs with your thumbs, and just rock the unit gently with your fingers. It should pop right out.”
I put my thumbs on the aforementioned tabs and pressed gently. “Like this?”
“Uh huh. Maybe a little harder. Now use your fingers, rock it back and forth. Yeah.”
The unit popped right out. I held it up, studied it: a rectangular prism of clear plastic, full of voids and mazey channels run through with gold wiring and black, insectile chips the size of fingernails. Inside, in the heart of it, threads of light winked on and off, a tiny mesh of blue and red flickers locked away inside the plastic. Not something I could fix, per se, if it actually broke, but I could easily see how dirt could get inside, and spraying the whole thing down with solvent and air jets and then wiping it clean was certainly well within my powers.
I was about to do just this when something caught my eye, something yellow and spidery in the space behind where the MLU had fit. Wallich had flashed me a tutorial on the resource allocation oversight console and made me review it three times, so in a wireframe schematic sense I had a fairly good idea what guts went where. This bean-sized object, though, did not correspond to anything I remembered.
“Hallo,” I said, “what's this?”
Wallich drifted in closer. “Hmm?”
“This here, this yellow thing with all the wires coming out. Is that part of the network feed?”
“No,” Wallich said, “it sure isn't. I don't know what that thing is. Here, move away for a minute.”
I disengaged from my chair and let Wallich settle in where I had been. He traced and poked at the air for a moment, and his zee-spec's work lamps came on. He leaned in for a closer look.
“Damn,” he said, “I don't know what that thing is at all. It doesn't show on the schematic. If somebody's retrofitted around a design error, I sure as hell never heard about it. Jesus.”
He pulled an instrument from his breast pocket, waved it at the yellow thing, and frowned. “There's a small processor in there, doing I don't know what. No independent power source, no sign of volatiles or toxins, minimal EM emissions... It's not a bomb, not a transmitter, not apparently any sort of sensor. This isn't funny. Where the fuck does this thing connect?”
He began tracing the wires out with his finger, clucking and muttering to himself.
“Could it be some sort of monitoring device?” I asked.
Wallich let out a quick sigh of impatience and minimal amusement. “Some sort of monitoring device. I think that would be a safe bet, yes. You're a genius, Strasheim. Look at this. Look: it taps into the diagnostic feed right here, and telemetry over here, and this one looks like it might head straight around to the main transmitter. Jesus Christ.”
“So what does it do?”
“I don't know. I don't know. I have an idea, though; have you got any messages waiting to go out?”
I had twenty-three of them, five of which exceeded the six-terabyte buffer limit and were thus broken down still further. Busy-work or no, I'd found a lot more free time here on Louis Pasteur than I'd ever had back home—hours and hours of it in great, uninterrupted blocks. All I had to do was close the door of my cabin, finger up the news and talk channels, wait out the round-trip light delay, and read the day's concerns all in a shot. Then, a bit more circuitously, I'd roam Immunity records and library sites and my own zee-spec's internal references, shake the data around for a while, and produce blocks of refined information. And when all that was done, I often found I still had an hour or three before my sleep shift in which to juggle the information into patterns of useful insight. Not just for one or two stories, you understand, but for all of them. For the first time in my life, I felt completely in touch with the society that created and supported me, from a vantage point fully eighty million kilometers away and receeding rapidly.
This irony was the subject of a whole editorial by itself.
Not that I was shirking my duties as mission correspondent. In fact, I sometimes worried I was overreporting the details of life within Louis Pasteur's confined spaces, but even so, the fullest of days didn't get more than about ten minutes' total coverage, meaning maybe an hour of postproduction on the day's sights and sounds.
And then there was mail, the volume of which was rapidly getting out of hand. One of my outgoing messages was a form response to a hundred and nine separate viewers!
“I have messages I haven't cued yet,” I said to Wallich. “Several of them. Why, what have you got in mind?”
“Send one of them out.”
“Don't you want to 'review' it?”
“No. Send one out now, please.”
His tone let me know this was an order, not a suggestion, and anyway my comment had not been very fair; his censorial input had so far been negligible, really just a glance here and there and some nudges to edit around the profanity.
“Yes, sir,” I said without sarcasm, and traced the appropriate icons on my zee, feeding refined message data into the transmit cue.
“God damn!” Wallich said right away. “God damn! Activity in that processor jumped a factor of a million for a moment there, and it definitely sent something off into the transmitter. Lehne!”
There was a pause, Wallich fingering at the unseen.
“Lenhe! Wake up and report to the bridge! Baucum, you too.”
Another pause.
“Because I'm telling you to, that's why,” Wallich said. He turned back to me. “I think this thing just piggybacked a signal on your outgoing message. Deeply encrypted—I couldn't detect anything in the bit stream—but I'll bet my next year's pay that's what happened.”
Baucum appeared in the hatchway, Tosca Lehne hovering behind her. You know the look of people who've been woken from a sound sleep with bad news? That's how they looked, though both were fully dressed.
“We've been bugged,” Wallich told them both. He pointed at the yellow spider. “In here. I want a full diagnostic on this thing before we cut it out, and I want every panel on this ship removed, and every circuit checked for tampering. Whoever put this thing in here did not have your best interests at heart.”
That comment seemed to strike him as funny, and he couldn't quite keep from chuckling.
Well, so much for free time. I'm embarassed to admit that my first thoughts were not for the safety of the ship and crew, but for the audience back home: I'd recorded Wallich's statement, and the entry of Lehne and Baucum just before it, and now I leaned close for a good shot at the spider itself, thinking, this will sure generate some mail! And oh, how right I was.
~~~
In a way, it would have been better if we'd found another bug or two. As it was, we tore apart every piece of that ship and found nothing suspicious. As for my little spider, it turned out to be exactly what Wallich h
ad surmised: a device which studied the contents of central processing, compressed and encrypted a summary, and melded it almost seamlessly with any outgoing transmissions. The more we talked with the folks back home, the more information we leaked about our position, our trajectory, our resource allocations and other plans...
Who would want such information? The Temples of Transcendent Evolution were obviously a prime suspect, though what use they could make of it was far from clear, and Rapisardi's insistence that we had other enemies was a telling point, and one echoed firmly by Wallich. And how could the Temples put together so sophisticated a device, and interface it so cleanly and invisibly with Louis Pasteur's data processing systems? Anyone with that kind of access could just sneak code into the system for a purely software solution, yes? Well, apparently not; we searched there as well, for nearly a full day, and turned up nothing at all. Needless to say, this lack of conclusion was about as satisfying as a mouthful of plastic foam.
Too, since departure we had used our transmitter rather a lot. I was not the only one “working” in two places at once; Davenroy was collaborating with colleagues on some sort of technical paper, while Lehne and Rapisardi and Baucum made frequent correspondence, requests for reference material, et cetera. And Wallich, well, he was a system unto himself. It didn't seem to bother him, supervising his research teams back home even as he was leading our investigations here aboard the ship, and time-lagged or no, Vaclav Lottick certainly made his presence felt. My respect for Wallich went up several notches as I watched him tackle a couple of serious Immune system issues and organize a presentation to Lottick on same, while dismantling, combing through, and reassembling the innards of his own bridge workstation.
