Memory's Exile

by Anna Gaffey

  “If you don’t get rest and let this stuff work, Jake…” Santos sounded very far away, even though he still felt her steel grip on his wrist. “…you’ll drop dead.”

  The memory gem dug into his neck, and Jake tried to cover it, tried to roll his head over the pillow without drawing attention to…something. What was he doing? “Well.” It was hard to talk: his mouth had already gone mushy-warm. He had to force the words to follow their proper sounds and places. “At least. I won’t need. Deal with Kai anymore.”

  Santos gave him a dutiful smile. As he reached up to make sure that her neck really was there, unblemished and smooth, he saw the deep-focused worry in her eyes. Then she faded away, and he heard, saw Carmichael’s holographic heart beating with slow, blue pulses where her head had been. Toby was alive.

  Unless it was only a dream again. Jake dropped his hand and followed it down into darkness.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Vid and memory access log, Infirmary Console L1A

  Commands: Lindy, Katherine. 01 Nov 2242 02:30--03:01

  02:30:15 Initiate new file. Autopsy on Silverman, Alice R.

  02:30:45 Diagnostic on Chen, Mei. Samples drawn for comparison of Jeong, J.’s analysis timed 10:19:00.

  02:30:55 Minimum dosage of stimulant tablets from stock, distributed to Lindy, K.

  02:31:10 Minimum requisition of liquid caffeine substitute, distributed to Lindy, K.

  02:34:30 Disinfectant spray activated. Auto flesh clamps activated.

  02:34:51 Auto flesh clamp malfunction. Deactivated.

  02:35:49 Manual clamps activated. Tracking Y-cut laser incision.

  02:40:01 Incision complete.

  02:44:58 Autopsy notes, external exam, manual input by Lindy, K.:

  Silverman, Alice R. Flesh is extremely dry at all points of incision. Reiterate marks at the base of subject’s neck. Judging by color, size and age, they are perimortem, and not cause of death. Pilot Connor Griffin notes no sign of intrusion, no evidence of self-harm. Cause of death likely heart failure. Note to requisitions, Santos, the flesh clamps are not worth a shit and need to be replaced.

  02:46:39 Autopsy scan activated.

  02:47:00 [System busy: scanning]

  02:48:00 [System busy: scanning]

  02:48:23 Query Lindy: Silverman, Alice medical file, Harmon.

  02:48:50 Query result: negative

  02:49:00 [System busy: scanning]

  02:50:23 Scan complete.

  02:53:42 Scan results:

  Silverman, Alice R. Cause of death: heart failure due to overall detrimental dehydration and collapse of left ventricle. Organ is damaged and underweight but not severely. Decomp rate: normal. Hereditary predisposition: none [pending access to complete medical file]. Possible causes: cryo berth-induced anorexia combined with unknown environmental factors.

  02:55:37 Autopsy scan activated. Tight scan requested.

  02:55:55 SYSTEM OVERRIDE: ALERT

  02:56:04 SYSTEM OVERRIDE: MEDICAL LOCKDOWN REQUIRED

  02:56:11 Query Lindy: Specify reason for medical lockdown?

  02:56:15 Query result: UNKNOWN

  02:56:17 Query result: LEECH LEECH LEECH LEECH LEECH

  02:56:18 Query result: UNKNOWN

  02:56:21 Medical lockdown activated. Boost box activated for Lindy, K.

  02:56:26 System alert to all station hands

  02:56:27 SYSTEM OVERRIDE: Medical lockdown no longer required.

  02:56:30 Query Lindy: Specify reason for medical lockdown?

  02:56:35 Query result: Medical lockdown no longer required.

  02:56:42 Query Lindy: Specify reason medical lockdown is no longer required? Priority medical.

  02:56:59 [System busy: querying]

  02:57:13 [System busy: querying]

  02:57:34 Query result: Medical lockdown no longer required. Viral presence no longer detected. All systems normal.

  02:57:44 Query Lindy: Specify virus or other infectious agent presumed present.

  02:58:02 Query result: No infectious agent present. All systems normal. Continue scan?

  02:59:40 Minimum requisition of liquid caffeine substitute, distributed to Lindy, K. Override requisition limits.

  03:01:38. Diagnostic on Chen, Mei, complete. No recognized anomalies.

  Excerpt, vid and memory access log

  Console L1A, Level 1, Infirmary

  01 November 2242

  United Worlds DS 2075-5 [Selas Station]

  Satellite 1H-24HM, 24HM System [updated: Eos]

  [Archived: United Governance Board tri-system mission records, Earth]

  1 November 2242 AEC

  18:39

  His hearing returned first. Someone had dimmed the lights so low that it was impossible to see anything, but Jake could hear. Voices burred back and forth over his head, strident and intrusive and couldn’t they be quiet, because he was trying to sleep here? A hard lump dug into his neck.

  One of the voices said with ringing clarity, “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. I was just bringing—”

  Jake gasped. He sat up. As he did, he collided with something heavy and flat: a mess hall food tray, which flipped neatly into his lap. Hot liquid sopped into his blankets.

  “Well, shit,” came Con’s voice out of the dark. The bedside lamp flicked on, and Con leaned over the cot to rescue the overturned bowl of tomato soup. Sadly, it smelled delicious.

  “Nice,” Santos murmured from the foot of the bed. She untucked the covers and rolled them up over Jake’s bare feet.

  “Hey,” Jake began.

  She glared at him. “You going to just marinate there?”

  “No, but—” He settled for flailing his hands over his crotch as she whipped away his blankets.

  “C’mon, Jake, modesty went out in the twenty-second.”

  “Just give a guy some warning, huh?” He crossed his ankles and tried to straighten his hospital pajamas as Santos bundled up the sheet. As she strode off in the direction of the laundry closet, the dream Santos flashed before him, her neck a grisly fissure, and Jake fiercely shook his head before he could stop himself. The damaged dream people were still with him, lurking around the edges of his still-drowsy vision, waiting for him to fall asleep again so they could remove their human masks, and then what? Then, nothing. He shook his head again, and it helped a little.

  Con lounged back against the wall, skeptical and shadowy in the lamplight. After a moment, he cleared his throat. “Sorry about that. Are you—”

  “Yep!” Jake said. “Fine. Much better. As you see.”

  Con made a superb show of examining the mess hall tray. He looked uninjured, if tired. His eyes flashed as he glanced at Jake, and Jake looked away until the remembered glassy orbs ebbed and the dream blood stopped its slow trickle down Con’s cheeks. It had been a dream. He had to get a grip and put it into its proper place. Still, he peeked back, just to make sure that Con had human eyes.

  Dreams, hallucinations, his chip. This was getting worrisome. Let it simmer a while. Need more data. All right, he could do that, as long as he had enough occupying distractions in the meantime. But his limbs responded sluggishly to his attempts to move. Clearly, Lindy was too tired to be mixing delicate KO cocktails. He tried to calculate how long the drugs would linger in his system, but when he looked to Lindy’s ancient brass wall chrono, its screen was blank. That was wrong. Heart dictated the chronos.

  “I think the sandwiches are still good, if you’re interested.” Con offered the soup-soaked tray.

  “Um.” Interested wasn’t the word Jake would have chosen. His mind was on overflow with bizarre visceral gore and gratitude and relief so strong he feared he might burst with it, and yet… “I am hungry. I mean, I was. What happened in there?”

  “Give it a minute,” Con advised. “Eat first.” He transferred the sandwiches to Jake’s lap and slouched back again.

  Jake didn’t quite like that, but once he touched the food, he found it hard to think of anything else. The squares
of toasted bread (new baked flatbread, not the frozen cardboard garbage they’d been finishing off for the last few months) were black on the edges and buttery in the center from hasty toasting, but the cheese inside was hot and melted and perfect. Jake wolfed them down and then, guilty, looked around for Dr. Lindy. Surely she’d have something to say about his eating so soon after ingesting enough sedative to tranq a cattle shipment.

  “She’s asleep.” Con jerked a thumb over his shoulder. On the cot behind him, Lindy lay stiff and unmoving, her eyelids flickering. “Finally. Couldn’t even get her to go back to her quarters. Santos tried. But she wanted to be near Carmichael, just in case. Lindy did, not Santos. Although Santos was somewhat…distracted.”

  “Right,” Jake said. No, that’s wrong. Lindy, yes. Carmichael was her patient. But Santos? When she was on duty, she was on duty. Hells, she was a procedural machine. He brushed the crumbs off his lap and tried to picture Santos pining by Carmichael’s bedside. Impossible. She wasn’t heartless, and they were close, involved. But it was still impossible. “He’s all right?”

  “So far.”

  The bed beyond Lindy’s was occupied, too. Jake could see the slope of a body under the white sheet, and he eased himself up higher. “Who’s that?” Con grabbed his arm, but not before Jake saw the small, closed-off face, the aureole of black hair, the bitten lips…

  He was halfway off the bed and kicking before he registered Con’s arms holding him back, Con’s voice in his ear, murmuring to him as if he, Jake, was the maniac in the room: Take it easy, take it easy. “Take it easy. She’s strapped down. And contained.” And yes, now Jake saw the chill blue glitter of containment, and underneath the clear plastic restraints. It looked as though Lindy had used up the infirmary’s entire stock. Mei looked so tiny underneath them, so normal that he could almost suppress the memory of the wretched sounds Carmichael had made in the lab. Almost. And the feel of Con’s arms should have comforted him, but instead they brought back the dream Con’s heavy inhuman grip, his unseeing glass eyes, underscored by the knowing susurrus of Selas trees.

  Jake shrugged out of Con’s hold as naturally as he could manage. For an instant, Con looked surprised, an expression so fleeting Jake might have imagined it. Then he settled back and shoved his hands into his pockets.

  “She’s been tranqed since after she left us in the lab. Dr. Ticonti found her wandering in the hallway outside crew quarters and brought her here.”

  Jake frowned. “Nat found her? And Mei didn’t hurt her?” Before he’d seen her take down Carmichael, he hadn’t thought Mei could hurt anyone.

  “She’s fine, Jake. She’s right over there.”

  Jake followed his pointing finger to the far side of the infirmary. Nat was there, standing with her back to them beside Santos who, even loaded down with fresh yellow blankets, was still able to gesticulate impressively with her elbows. He couldn’t see Nat’s teeth, and for that he was fervently glad.

  “She’s been standing in for Dr. Lindy.”

  “Nat?” Jake scoffed. “I don’t think she’s performed any practical medicine since her exams.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “But you were hurt, too. I saw you—I was scared you were—I mean, you looked…” Jake bit off the dead and tried again. “Hurt. So why aren’t you lying here all swaddled up, too?”

  “I was. Lindy fixed me up.”

  “Ah.” Back to that nagging, unpleasant little question of what the hell had happened to him, to all of them, and how long ago. “How long have I been out?”

  Con chewed his lip. “Jake. Listen, I need to—before anything else, there’s something you need to know. I should’ve told you earlier—”

  “Con, how long have I been out?”

  “Almost twelve hours,” Santos answered, appearing at the foot of the bed. She snapped out a fresh blanket and spread it over him in waft of yellow terry.

  “Seriously?” Jake gaped at them. “Then why the hell are you covering me back up? Nap time’s over. The station, whatever’s wrong with Mei—Carmichael—” He remembered Carmichael’s writhing legs, and the burgeoning green leaves on the science table, and he tried to swing his legs over the side of the bed. “Kai. My samples.”

  “It’s all right.” Santos fussed with the blanket, tucking the corners into place more sharply than necessary. “I kept an eye on things. Including Kai and your precious samples. Boxhill’s got Control while I’m down here, but he needs a break.”

  Beside Jake, Con stiffened slightly. Santos wasn’t addressing him, and yet…did tension pass between them? But it would be easy to misread tension for sheer exhaustion. Why the plaguing fuck had they all let Jake sleep so long?

  “There’s more. Dr. Lindy put both the Harmon and us on indefinite quarantine with regards to Earth vessels. So, we, ah, restarted the crew transfer. We’ve only done one load so far,” she hurried to add. “Two Science lab contracts and some general station techs, and only them because—”

  “No, no. That makes sense, we can’t leave them out there forever.” Jake struggled to keep the relief out of his voice. Santos would take care of everything. Of course she would. And he could assist, and then get back down to the lab. If he could first locate his pants.

  “Duty rosters are next,” Santos continued. “If you’re up to it, I could use your help with appointing the new cargo bay administrators. I have to do the ones for Security myself.”

  “Boxhill can handle the mess and rations crew, unless—oh.” Jake lifted the blanket and brushed the crumbs off his lap. “Right. Good sandwich.”

  “First thing I did, slow man.” Santos tapped her head. “My mama gave me good sense and an appetite.”

  Too bad for the new recruits. Most of them had probably been in the mess and had seen Mei freak out. Who’d want to start their contract there? Jake stole a longer peek to his left.

  In sleep, Mei looked like a bulky child, her round face soft and relaxed. She seemed to have lost any stable sense of being. Jake had no idea what would surface next: friend or attacker? Thick layers of plastic strapping mummified her legs, the slick restraints bizarre and antiquated in comparison to the blue containment shielding that covered the length of her blanketed body. Lucky for all of them that Lindy had insisted they update the infirmary’s containment tech before any other level.

  Updates. The station’s history. Why did that stand out to him?

  Santos cleared her throat. She looked damned calm in her still-sharp uniform, no less polished than any other day, despite the deepening shadows under her eyes.

  “Sorry,” Jake said. “Nice, um. Initiative. I’m just processing, that’s all.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “Mm-hmm.”

  “I’m not gonna give you any trouble, Rachel. Just tell me what to do.”

  “No questions? No crabbing about assignments? That doesn’t sound like the Dr. Jeong I know and love.”

  “We divvied up the work squarely enough with Carmichael. What, you think I’m gonna throw a coup before he wakes up?” At the word coup, her gaze darted toward Con. But she smiled and heaved one of her long-suffering sighs, and Jake dismissed it.

  “I knew I should have just given you a duty roster.”

  “But then you wouldn’t get the pleasure of my debate.” Jake craned his neck. How many places were there in an infirmary to hide pants? Maybe they were stuffed in a storage locker.

  “Sure you don’t want to nap for a few more hours?”

  “Witnesses.” Jake picked at a crumb of toast. “You can’t beat me up unless we’re alone.”

  “Crew discipline shouldn’t take place in front of others.” Santos looked genuinely disappointed. “It’s one of the founding tenets of morale management.”

  “Is that what we’re calling it now?” Founding. The original space crew. The original scans. The bodies. Updates. Something pinged him, something was coming together in the back of his head, but he couldn’t see it yet. “Sounds like you guys have bee
n busy. Let me tell you what I’ve been doing. It ain’t astral projection, but it doesn’t feel far off.”

  When he finished, Santos was clutching her neck, and Con wouldn’t meet Jake’s gaze.

  “So here’s what I’m thinking. Please, I’d like to do this without a psych eval. I keep going back to Selas, right? I mean, granted, it’s in my head. But that’s got to mean something. I don’t know if it’s related, but I don’t want to hurt anyone. Not like Mei.” Don’t let me be hurt like her. He refused to look in Mei’s direction.

  “But Lindy hasn’t looked at your head yet.” Santos dropped her hands from her neck. “This sounds like a case for Nat. I’m sorry you two don’t get along, but it’s possible we’re dealing with bigger complications.”

  Jake shuddered. He looked across the room, but Nat had vanished, probably into the supply closet. “I’m hoping the problem is more physical. Chip malfunction of some kind. It would explain everything. Have you ever seen the failed implantations? I mean the complete failures. They’re incredibly rare, but illuminating. They either get put down before they leave the operating room, or they end up in a new padded cell on permanent KO rations. We could hear them nice and loud when the drugs ran out. If that’s what’ll happen to me, then dope me up and drop me now before I do hurt someone. And I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but the lab folks at the Bends could lend a hand.”

  In the face of his now-waning sanity, he could see clearly how lucky he’d been for the past decade. But what was ten years if his brain still went out to lunch in the end?

  “Let’s wait on contacting anyone off station. In any case, it doesn’t explain Mei and what she did to Carmichael and Con,” Santos said. “Did your chip do that? Suck the life out of them? Although Con recovered quickly enough. Security cam caught some of it.”

  “I was lucky,” Con said harshly.

  There was the tension he’d glimpsed. Jake would have to be an idiot twice over not to see it now. “Let’s focus back on the big issues, then. We all get headaches, weird dreams from Selas.”