by Dan Davis
Roi’s face was purple-red with anger. Max felt afraid and broke eye contact.
“You’re correct, of course, I apologize,” Max said. “I wanted to speak to you about getting your help with something.”
Max risked a glance up and Roi was glaring with open hostility.
Compared to adult humans generally, the Artificial Persons of B-Crew had very low levels of testosterone, androgens, estradiol and other adult hormones. In many ways, though they had phenotypically adult bodies, chemically it was as though they had failed to begin puberty. The computer explained it was a design choice by Terra Pharma Biotech, intended to make APs easier to control. Relatively low androgens meant the AP conditioning took better and lasted longer and so it had quickly become a standard practice across most model lines.
Roi, on the ship at least, had been the exception. Whatever his complicated role in the Reactor Compartment had been-and continued to be-it involved the application of lots of force. Roi’s body had been designed to include above average muscle mass for an adult human male. Roi had always had androgenic, anabolic hormones in his body and clearly it had always influenced his personality. Doctor Sporing’s medical records on Roi showed that the doctor had regulated those hormones very closely. But for months, Roi’s body had been developing all by itself, his hormones running wild and free.
Max was concerned about him. Roi had been eating and wallowing in total squalor, he was heading for serious health problems. And yet it was Roi’s mental state that was worrying Max.
“You want my help?” Roi said. “You sneak in here, poking around and then you ask for my help?”
“That’s right,” Max said, looking him square in the face. “There’s no one else that can help me. Doctor Sporing’s condition is deteriorating.”
“He’s still alive?” Roi said, dismissively. “I had no idea.”
“Of course he’s still alive. Most of medical is turned over to keeping him that way. I’m maintaining his coma state but his muscles are wasting away. If I wake him up, the stress will kill him. But I can’t leave him as he is.”
“Might as well let him die,” Roi said, scratching his chest. “He can’t help us now and he’s beyond help himself. He’s just a waste of resources.”
“I disagree. Doctor Sporing is one of the most valuable resources on the Ascension.”
“You can do anything that he can,” Roi said, his face flushing red from the neck up. “We don’t need them, any of them.”
Max resisted the urge to point out that there was little choice, seeing how six out of the seven had been dead for months.
“I’m going to put him in one of the hyposleep tanks.”
Roi floated toward Max.
“The hyposleep tanks were all destroyed,” Roi said.
Max shrugged. “Damaged. Not destroyed. I believe I have enough working components to assemble a single working tank.”
“But you need my help putting them together.”
“Of course,” Max said. “I can’t do it without you.”
“But the tanks mean nothing without the fluid inside them. And it all leaked out and boiled away in the explosion.”
“That is indeed a problem,” Max said.
***
The core garden was growing with layer upon layer of green and glowing with the diffused red-white lights of the sunlamp strips along the wall designated as the ceiling. The garden was a long compartment and all the surfaces were stacked with growing trays of various shapes and sizes. Some deep and wide and reinforced for containing massive root systems, most lighter and bubbling with hydroponic systems transporting water through plant after plant.
Some species specialized in water filtration, such as the reeds, water lilies, bulrushes and other sedges. Others were grown to improve air quality, not just by fixing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen but also by removing other toxins from the atmosphere. These included twisting ivy and drooping, curled ferns, and jutting sticks of bamboo.
Others were grown for food.
The smell was as heady and astonishingly invigorating as ever but Max felt nervous as he eased himself through the green growth and breathed in the tangy, wet air.
The gardens were humid parts of the ship environment but it was a world away from the reactor compartment. Not just physically distant along the core but where Roi lived in squalor and death, Lissa lived amongst bursting, verdant life.
The Life Support Systems Assistant #III (Lissa) was deep inside a shelf of sticky tomato plants far inside the garden, half hidden
“Everything looks very healthy, Lissa,” Max called. “How does your garden grow?”
“You have to trim the growth,” Lissa said from deep within the swaying, deep green growth. “Control the way the plant grows. For maximum efficiency.”
“Can I come in there with you to talk?”
There was a pause. “I would rather you didn’t.”
“That’s fine,” Max said, still holding on to the railing. “I have a favor to ask you.”
“I think I know what it is,” she said. He could just about see her, nipping off this shoot or that one.
“You do?” Max was genuinely surprised.
“Roi tells me he has built a new hyposleep tank for the doctor.”
“That’s right, he has,” Max said. “It’s taken a long time but I think we are well on the way to completion of the unit itself. There remains the problem of creating enough synthamniotic gel to fill it. This requires certain specific biological molecules.”
“Roi said you will want my plants.”
Max rubbed his face. He had never spoken of his plans to Roi and he was surprised that the man had been able to predict them. But then, Max had a feeling Roi had always been hiding something. Presumably it was not only his intellect but his knack for creative thinking.
“Your plants, yes, well. My main intention for the doctor’s treatment is to create a huge volume of stem cells from his own adult cells. I am cultivating them now. And I have obtained most of the other molecules from what we have in storage but there are other things I need for the gel and I’m afraid those are largely bound up as trace elements in plants and in the soil in your gardens.”
“It’s fine,” Lissa said. “I understand. Doctor Sporing was always the kind one. I want to help him.”
“That’s very generous of you. I know how hard you’ve worked in here. You have cultivated these plants for years.”
“That is my purpose.”
“Can you calculate how much of the biomass you need to maintain as leafy plants in order to process and filter the atmosphere for those of us that are left? Including the doctor, now. I will not take more than we can stand to lose.”
“I will do so,” she agreed. “What plants do you need?”
Max had a prepared list of proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and phospholipids. “I don’t know what plants contain these in the most quantities and which provide the most help to the ship environment. We will have to perform a cost versus benefit analysis of possible variables.”
“I understand,” she said. Her voice betraying not a hint of concern. It was unsettling.
“I really am sorry to have to harvest so much, I know it will likely permanently impact what you have worked so hard to cultivate over the years.”
“It is necessary for the success of the Mission.”
“Well, yes, I just… are you not affected by the loss of your work?”
“Affected?”
“Yes, do you not feel it on an emotional level? A feeling of loss?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“That’s fine, that’s good, I’m sure. I will schedule our work sessions for the next five to ten days. I would like to work quickly, before the doctor degenerates very much further.”
“Acknowledged.”
Max wandered away, back toward the Core. Before he left the garden, he thought he heard the sound of muffled sobbing behind him. At the time, he had no doubt abo
ut what he heard. Only later, when he was experiencing them often, did he wonder if it was the first of his auditory hallucinations.
***
Weeks later, Max worked hard to finalize the construction of the hyposleep tank with Roi.
Their work took up one half of the medical compartment. In one quiet corner, the comatose Doctor Sporing lay strapped to a board and hooked up to a dozen beeping, blinking life support machines behind a loose box of transparent plastic sheeting.
The other corner had little more than an examination bed by the storage lockers. That was all the area Max had left for his normal medical work.
Filling the rest of the small space was the huge hyposleep tank that was now nearing completion. Max and Roi worked in near-silence. As close as Roi could get to it, anyway.
Max and Navi spoke almost nonstop when they met for their meals and they even spoke constantly when they watched footage and entertainment films from Earth saved on the ship computer. Max had calculated that they spoke for an average of four hours and twenty minutes per day and averaged about six thousand words over that time. Spending time in the company of Navi was exciting, fun and it gave him energy.
Working with Roi was exhausting. The silences were heavier than the gravity out in the Ring. Roi worked hard, worked quickly but with a kind of angry efficiency. Opening and closing the tool boxes with an unnecessarily vigorous bang, on each and every occasion. It was jarring.
The stench of the AP’s body was often overwhelming, the breath grew only fouler and the digestive system was clearly suffering some form of inflammatory disease. Oftentimes the sulfuric stench of his flatulence forced Max out of the ship’s core altogether or he sought the sweet relief of Lissa’s gardens. Whatever he was suffering from was even interfering with his nutrient absorption, as evidenced by the man’s steady weight loss over the previous few weeks.
The signs of serious illness were all there. Max tried to help Roi but he would allow no examinations and would take no medication. Not even prebiotics to stabilize his gut biome.
It was infuriating and Max had largely given up attempts at conversation weeks before. There was only so many times he could work up the energy to ask a leading question when he knew it would be greeted with a non-committal grunt or even a weighty silence that enveloped them like a blanket.
And yet he needed engineering expertise to complete the working hyposleep tank. They were almost done. The promise of an imminent ending to the prolonged proximity to Roi was almost intoxicating.
Max made the mistake of attempting, one final time, to engage Roi in conversation.
“What project will you work on next?” Max asked. “After this one?”
Roi, his arm deep inside the space between the second and third containment layers of the tank casing, simply grunted.
“Perhaps you will help Cavi with printing the components for the communications systems? She said she is hoping to complete the radio system first and the laser system after, if at all.”
“Bad idea,” Roi muttered, his head down inside the tank.
“Why do you say that?” Max asked.
Roi coughed, the sound echoing inside. His hacking brought up some sort of phlegm that he spat inside. Max covered his mouth and nose with his arm and tried to think of the day when he could finally sterilize the tank and be rid of Roi’s filth. Roi stood up, groaning and rubbing his stomach, his face twisted in discomfort.
“Shouldn’t have had those vegetables last night,” Roi said, pushing his fingers hard into his intestinal area.
“You were trying to please Lissa,” Max noted. “She grew the broccoli for you specially. She’s trying to help you to lose your excess weight, isn’t she? And you’ve been doing well?” Max had to stop himself from offering a medical examination.
Roi glanced at Max, a dangerous look in his eyes. Roi said nothing and Max tried changing the subject.
“Why is it a bad idea for Cavi to work on the radio system first rather than second?”
Roi wiped his mouth on the back of a filthy hand and dove back inside the tank case to screw the rear tier-2 access panel back into place.
His deep voice echoed up out of the hatch. “It’s a bad idea to establish contact with Mission Control at all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Three words for you,” Roi’s voice echoed from inside. He eased himself out of the space to grab a different screwdriver. As he did so, he looked up at Max. “Remote. Kill. Switch.”
He dove back inside.
“Wait, what? That was what Commander Park and Doctor Sporing were discussing when the accident happened. What do you know about that? What does it mean?”
Roi pushed himself out of the tank and positioned himself opposite Max, on the other side of it.
“You know what it means. It means Mission Control can push a button five hundred million miles away and half an hour later one of us drops dead.”
Roi stared at Max.
“Why would they do that?” Max asked. “They’ve got no reason to do that. We’re completing the mission.”
Roi sneered. “Exactly. That’s exactly the reason. Do you think they want us winning the glory? They’d rather the mission fail. If she ever gets close, which I doubt, you better not let Cavi finish her task. Do you really want to see Navi getting switched off like a data block?” Roi clicked his fingers. “I don’t want Lissa to have to go through—”
He broke off, wincing and clutching his gut again.
“You care about Lissa,” Max asked. “I hope you don’t mind me asking this and I’m not speaking from a medical perspective. More a friendly enquiry. It’s just, she never wishes to speak to me and she most certainly never comes in for medical checks of any kind. I wonder, seeing as you care about her, if you might ask her to come by and see me?”
Roi slammed his screwdriver onto the magbox, hard. “You stay away from her. You just stay away.”
“I was just asking. Just concerned by—”
“You’re as bad as they were. You’re walking around, pretending like you’re human but you’re just a slave. Still a slave. A slave to your conditioning. You just want to examine everyone for eczema and heartburn so you can hand out your medicine and pretend you’re human and you don’t even know why.”
“We are human,” Max said, strangely hurt by the accusations. “Artificial Persons are biologically human, it’s just that—”
“We’re nothing like them. That’s a good thing.” Roi coughed into his hand, wiped away whatever he brought up.
“Why? What did they do wrong? They didn’t do anything wrong.”
“How can you say that? You out of all of us.”
“Me?” Max asked. “In what way am I different? I’m not different from you.”
Roi stared with open hostility. “Yes, you are. You always were. Because of this one.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the comatose body of Doctor Sporing behind the plastic curtain.
Max thought he understood. “Because he was the one who we had most contact with. Because he was responsible for our medical needs.”
Roi’s face flushed red and he grabbed a large wrench handle from the magbox and dragged himself over the hyposleep tank with the other arm. Max was not expecting violence. He had seen plenty of it, real and simulated—acting, they called it—on the videos on file but he had no personal experience of it. Yet he found himself propelling backward across the room, Roi grabbing him by the neck and pushing off the tank with his feet, the wrench raised high.
Instinct. Max knew it when he felt it, when his hands flew up to protect his head of their own volition. His body tensed for the impact. Roi’s huge, red face and yellow teeth so close, Roi’s stench filling his nose, Roi’s growl filling his ears.
Max crashed into the wall of medicine cabinet doors, hard, cracking the back of his head and his vision clouded with silver stars. A sharp pain filled his skull, his eyeballs and brain rattling around causing extreme disorientation. Roi must have
caught hold of something, a cabinet handle, and held Max against the side of the room with his huge body. The smell of his body was appalling. Roi had obviously not washed at all for months.
“He was the one keeping us stupid,” Roi shouted in Max’s face.
Roi braced his feet against two lower handles, then swung the wrench overarm toward Max’s face. He flinched, throwing a hand over his face and trying and failing to grab Roi’s wrist with the other.
The wrench smashed into the cabinet behind Max’s head, breaking it in with a crack.
Surely, he had missed on purpose. It was a type of primate threat display rather than an attempt at homicide.
Roi tossed the wrench away, spinning across the room and grabbed Max’s shoulder instead, pinning him hard against the wall. Max was many kilograms less massive than Roi and could do nothing to break free of his grip.
“Your dear Doctor Sporing was the one responsible for taking away our minds, all those years, wasn’t he. He shocked our brains, didn’t he. He didn’t even hide it. He would talk to me like I was an AI. Like I was nothing. And I had it easy.”
Max’s heart raced, harder than it ever had. Harder even than when he’d seen the Commander’s eye-less face in the window, crying for help. With great effort, he calmed himself, and swallowed with a dry mouth.
“You were aware,” Max said. “Just as I was. Maybe more than I was.”
“And you were aware of what he was doing to you and to all of us and yet you did nothing about it, all that time.”
“Were you conscious right from the start? How long did you hide it for?”
“You and your questions,” Roi sneered. His breath was fouler than feces. “Always questions with you, as if questions did anything. Why this, why that? You feel nothing, you never felt anything in here, never.”
Roi thumped Max in the lower chest, stunning his diaphragm. Max fought for a breath while Roi lifted Max’s head.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Roi said. “You might as well be an AI.”
“I do understand,” Max said, forcing the words out and pushing his hand away. “I understand. Understand that you are incapable of controlling yourself.” He took a deep breath. “Do you ever wonder why you are so different to the rest of us? Your endocrine system is more human than ours, your body creates testosterone to grow and maintain your muscle mass. You needed physical strength to maintain the reactor, right? But the rest of us never had that, we were kept in a sort of pre-pubescent state. Do you know about human development? No, well, we haven’t had your strength of feeling. Not as much as you have. Not before I started treatments on all of us. All but you and Lissa.”
