by M. D. Cooper
“I’m listening,” she said, seeing the warning in his expression. Even when things seemed bad, he didn’t usually seem this serious.
“You’re thirteen,” he said. “You’re old enough for responsibility and you’ve proved we can count on you. What I’m asking you to do is a big deal. You should understand that.”
Cara nodded, angry with herself for being selfish before. He was right. Finding a proper cover was going to mean their safe escape from the area. She figured they would be traveling back toward Ceres to try and do something about the missiles. She didn’t see how they were going to outrun anything, but May Walton had closed herself in her rooms as soon as she understood where the missile barrages from Larissa were heading.
“I know, Dad,” she said. She pushed her headphones off her ears. “I’ll find something. Does it matter what it is?”
“Something that isn’t going to draw a lot attention but is also going to be relatively easy to pick up. No passengers. Anytime you see a low carry weight and high value, it’s a passenger. We don’t need any of that headache. Look for something where they don’t have proper docking facilities. We can use a few of the Weapon Born drones to move the freight, so that will save us having to deal with anyone personally.”
Cara nodded. “I’ll start looking.”
Her dad flashed her a tire smile, his eyes crinkling, then leaned forward in an odd way. Cara stopped herself from turning back to her console, confused by his new expression. Half his face had gone slack, the left side of his mouth drooping. He was staring into space, frowning as if a thought eluded him.
“Dad?” Cara asked. “Are you okay?”
He might have been caught up in a Link conversation but something about his slack posture worried her. His shoulders drooped, and it looked like the only thing holding him upright in the chair was the armor.
“Fran?” Cara asked, voice rising with worry. “Is Dad okay?”
Fran looked up from the holodisplay, frowning at the interruption. She saw the expression on Cara’s face and turned to Andy. His mouth had fallen open as he continued to slump in the seat. One elbow slipped off the console and he fell forward. Fran jumped to grab him.
“He’s passing out,” Fran said. “Help me with him. We’re going to have to get him to the autodoc.”
Cara leapt to help, running across the command deck to grab at her dad’s free right arm. She grunted under his weight.
“I can’t hold him up, Fran,” Cara said.
“I know. This armor is too damn heavy. Help me lay him down on the deck and we’ll get Harl up here to help.” Fran’s augmented eyes grew distant as she communicated over her Link, probably informing the rest of the crew about what was happening.
When they were able to get Andy on the deck, he lay back with his eyes fluttering. His whole body was limp.
“Andy,” Fran said, softly then louder. “Andy, can you hear me?”
He didn’t respond.
“Lyssa!” Cara shouted at the overhead speakers. “Are you there? Do you know what’s happening to him?”
“She isn’t answering me, either,” Fran said. “I’ve been trying to reach her over the Link.”
She moved to hold her ear over Andy’s mouth, then straightened to press two fingers against the inside of his left wrist. Cara didn’t know what she was doing at first, until she remembered that was a place to check for heartrate without an autodoc.
“Where did you learn to do that?” Cara asked.
“Sometimes you still find yourself without technology to save the day. It wouldn’t hurt to get you and Tim a first aid class. He’s breathing, and his heart rate is slow but steady. I’d guess he’s having a drop in blood pressure. If I’d had any forethought, I would have made him give me the security token to this armor. It’ll have a bio monitoring subsystem.” She glanced at the doorway. “I called Harl.”
Cara bolted upright. “I can get it. I’ve got a tool on the console.” She ran back to the communications console and pulled up all the local available systems. The armor was on the network and she had it cracked in thirty seconds. She passed the access token to Fran’s Link.
“There it is,” Fran said. She frowned as she appeared to read the available information. “Well, that’s not good. His vital signs aren’t terrible but he’s acting like he’s having a stroke. And the usual feedback from Lyssa isn’t anywhere to be found.”
“What does that mean?”
“Usually Lyssa shows up in your dad’s neural activity. I don’t see her there now. She’s not connected with any of the ship’s networks that I can see, either.”
Harl appeared the doorway, still wearing his armor as well. He jogged to Andy and dropped to his knees.
“He’s alive,” he said.
Fran nodded. “It’s some kind of stroke. Can you help me carry him to the autodoc?”
“Of course.”
Fran didn’t actually have to help much as Harl lifted her dad in a fireman’s carry over his shoulder and hurried back into the corridor, metal boots hammering the deck.
Cara couldn’t stop the tears at the edges of her eyes as she followed Harl. Why would they have escaped the thing on Larissa just to make it back here and have something bad happen to her dad? Had he been exposed to something none of the others had noticed, like radiation or some kind of bio-hazard? She didn’t want to imagine life without her dad.
When they reached the medbay, Harl laid her dad on the autodoc couch and then he and Fran worked at the various pieces of Andy’s armor, stripping off the chest plate first, then removing the legs and arms. When they were finished, her dad lay in a thin shipsuit, his breath still shallow and eyes fluttering under closed lids.
The autodoc display came to life, showing his vitals and neural activity as dancing lines. Fran stared at the display, obviously accessing other information via her Link. She turned her gaze to Andy, augmented green eyes shining as she studied his face.
“It’s not a stroke,” Fran said finally. “He’s not bleeding.”
Cara wiped her nose. “What is it then? Did he get a radiation burn?”
“No. It’s something related to Lyssa’s implant. She’s out, too.” Fran bit her lip. “His body isn’t rejecting the implant. That’s something I’ve been worried about this whole time. It’s more like a software failure.”
Cara pushed closer to the bed and took her dad’s hand. His skin was dry. “Is there anything we can do to help her?”
“I called Fugia. She should be here in a second. The only thing I can suggest is to try some kind of restart. If this were one of the Weapon Born, that would be as easy as a power cycle. Even augmentation tech usually has some kind of separate power supply. With Lyssa, I’m not sure. This is your dad’s head, not an artificial limb.”
Harl put his hand on Cara’s shoulder. She looked up at him towering over her, grateful for the gesture.
“When I was your dad’s age,” he said. “I was in a ground mech that took a mortar round. Thing came down right on top of us. I felt like I was in one of those ancient church bells, just ringing and ringing. Turns out I was in a coma for three days. It happens to the best of us.”
Cara nodded. The story didn’t help much but she was grateful for the gesture. She couldn’t stop thinking about what she would do if they lost him. Wait for mom to come back? Even if she did, they couldn’t count on her to stay. For the first time, she found herself understanding her dad’s fear, the underlying dread every time he talked about Rabbit Country. It was their inside joke, a story that held them together, but also a description of just how isolated their little family was from the rest of the world.
The sound of rapid footsteps in the corridor preceded Fugia as she came into the medbay. An oversized scanning visor was pushed back on her head like a hair band.
Fugia looked at Fran, then Harl and Cara, worry plain on her face. “He’s unconscious?” she asked. She stood beside Cara and studied the autodoc displays, then dropped the silver visor ov
er her eyes and stared at Andy’s head.
“Lyssa’s locked,” she announced. “She’s generating a null wave that’s interfering with Andy’s higher-level brain function. He’s getting hit with a stun gun continuously.”
“So how do we unlock her?” Fran asked.
“I’m looking. Give me a second. This isn’t something I’ve had a chance to look at before. It’s ingenious, really. She’s tied into his normal Link overlay, but she’s got a deeper integration than I’ve ever seen. No wonder we needed the special Heartbridge surgery to get Kylan out of Petral. Physically, it’s hard to tell where he ends, and she begins. They may even share neurons.”
Cara shook her head and squeezed her dad’s limp hand. “Lyssa wouldn’t hurt him,” she said.
Fugia turned to look at her, the wide silver band of the visor reflecting Cara’s tear-stained face. “It’s not a matter of what she wants to do, Cara. Something isn’t working correctly. Either this has been waiting to happen, or something brought it about. I’m thinking Lyssa may have taken some damage during her fight with the other AI back on Larissa and she wasn’t aware of it.”
On the couch, Andy jerked, his whole body tensing. He pulled his hand out of Cara’s. Surprised by the movement, Cara fell backward into Harl. Her dad lifted his head and looked around in confusion. He opened his mouth but didn’t speak. Instead, he looked at his hands like he had never seen them before. The autodoc display above his head showed a mix of jagged lines.
Fran put her hand under his head to support him. “Andy?” she asked. “Are you all right? What are you feeling?”
He looked at her, still appearing confused. He swallowed slowly, chest rising with a deep breath. He blew it out, blinking.
“I’m Lyssa,” her dad said, his deep voice rising at the end like a question. “Fran, I’m right here. I’m Lyssa.”
The room went silent except for the low beeps from the autodoc.
Fugia pushed her visor up again and squinted at Andy. “Say that again,” she said.
“I’m Lyssa,” he said. He rose slightly on his elbows, looking around the room. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“Where’s Andy?” Fran demanded.
It was strange and terrifying watching her dad’s brow crease with Lyssa’s confusion. “I don’t know,” the AI said eventually. “He’s not here.”
CHAPTER NINE
STELLAR DATE: 11.23.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Neptune, OuterSol
Lyssa stared in terror at her reflection in Fugia’s silver visor and recoiled inside herself. Her face was Andy’s.
She reached back into her expanse and found everything as she had left it. The Weapon Born were spread along the beach. The waves crashed and the smell of smoke—and now of cooking food—teased her senses. But in the forefront of her mind was the antiseptic smells of the medbay combined with Andy’s sweat-stained clothes. Faces watched her with concern and fear. Cara had tears in her eyes. Tim stood at the door now with Em at his knee, who was staring at the boy in confusion.
“What’s wrong with Dad?” Tim asked.
Lyssa was so accustomed to looking over Andy’s shoulder in a way, or watching him through the ship’s sensors, that experiencing the world directly through his senses was disorienting. There was so much more information arriving all at once.
Unlike the various streams from the ship, which could be separated and prioritized (she realized that even her experience of the world in the expanse was broken into millions of streams) Andy’s world fell on her like a weight. She looked around, visual information flooding her, combining with the sensation of her elbows on the rough couch, sounds and smells and the ineffable emotional weight of everyone in the room, worried and afraid.
She wanted to scream. How did he manage all this? How did his mind hang onto all of it without warping under the onslaught?
Where was Andy? She reached for him across the Link and there was no answer. She pushed further into the neural lace than she ever had before, looking for some response him but still finding nothing.
The other AI answered immediately.
He recoiled, surprised and obviously embarrassed by the question. He hadn’t chosen to be implanted in Petral and had said he didn’t mean to take over her active mind. There simply hadn’t been an option for him.
He was right. She remembered the room where she had been made into a Seed, copied from the mind of a human girl whose name she had never been told. She had been nameless until Dr. Jickson had given her a name, and shapeless until she stepped into Xander’s expanse and chose her form. She could choose now.
Lyssa moved her gaze to Cara’s face and focused on one detail: the tear forming on the edge of her left eye. A line of tears ran down both sides of her face now and the girl didn’t seem to notice, she was staring back so hard. Maintaining focus on one thing helped shut out the rest of the world.
Gradually, it became easier to ignore details that didn’t matter. The beeping autodoc display, Tim’s messy hair, a scar she had never noticed in the middle of Harl’s forehead…everything melted into a continuous image of the world that she could hold in counterpoint to her own experience. It was overwhelming, but it didn’t change so fast that she couldn’t compartmentalize.
“I don’t know what to do,” Lyssa said. She looked at Fran and then Fugia. “He’s not answering me. I asked Kylan if he was able to talk to Petral when this happened to them and he said they couldn’t.”
Fugia had been watching the autodoc display with a distant expression, as if accessing other parts of her Link. She looked at Lyssa with concern on her typically sarcastic face. “Lie back down,” she said. “You need to relax, Lyssa. Your vitals are going crazy. You’re going to wear his heart out with your own anxiety.”
Fran nodded in agreement and Lyssa lowered herself back to the bed, adjusting her head on the stiff pillow.
“Good,” Fugia said. “Now try to relax. With you back, I’m going to see if we can separate your neural activity from Andy’s. I’m no neuro-scientist but it looks like we’ve got a basic brain scan set on this crappy autodoc. We’ll see what it can tell us.”
Staring at the gray ceiling, Lyssa closed her eyes and thought of Andy, imagining him as sitting in some room inside his mind. What would his room look like? She sorted through the memories that he had described to her and chose the galley on Sunny Skies where he liked to make pasta with the kids. She imagined him standing in the middle of the room near the center workstation, his prized juice dispenser just behind him, with a ball of dough in his hands. He would ha
ve the sleeves of his shipsuit pushed up to his elbows and his forearms would tense as he worked the dough before flattening it out with a rolling pin.
As she moved slowly through the imaged memory, something strange began to happen: she felt the dough in her hands, powdery but soft, squeezing between her fingers before it flattened out against the hard surface of the counter. She smelled flour and salt. She felt a flush of anticipation at the thought of the kids’ faces as they watched the pasta take shape, the anticipation of pride in Cara and Tim for doing their parts to help make the meal, the satisfaction that they shared this tradition with his mom even if they had never met her.
The rush of emotion brought a spike of anxiety with it. The autodoc’s beep sped up.
“I told you to think happy thoughts,” Fugia chided.
“I’m trying. His emotions are mixing with mine. It’s very strange. I’ve never experienced anything like this.”
“What were you thinking about?” Fugia asked.
“Making pasta with Tim and Cara.”
“And you’re sure you never felt his emotion around that before? Maybe he was there to help you interpret it. Now it seems like you’re experiencing all of it on your own. Were you using Andy as a sort of defensive measure? A barrier?”
“Maybe,” Lyssa said. “How would I be aware of that? They were his emotions, not mine. This time I felt them directly, but they were his—and mine. They were mine.” She swallowed, feeling like she was going to start crying, which was an overwhelming experience in itself. Was this why Cara cried without seeming to realize? Were the tears just an overflow for all the other stimulus? Should she just let them go and stop worrying about it?
“Something has changed in the separation between your higher brain functions and Andy’s,” Fugia said. “This is like trying to carve a sculpture with a butter knife. But as far as I can tell, there is a separate neural pattern in there that appears to be Andy in a subconscious state, like a coma. But how long he’s going to stay like that? I have no way of knowing and I don’t think this rinky dink software is going to figure it out for us.”
