“Oh, shit,” Stein said. Beside her, Sergei sprang forward.
The hatchet came down, cracking the inner plastic surface of the window. The blade twisted and jammed itself into the plastic, and as the man struggled to free it, Sergei plowed into the side of him, smashing him into the window, shattering the plastic barrier. Chunks of plastic rained down on the pair.
Pandemonium, bodies upon bodies pushing for the exits, desperate to escape. Another security officer arrived, helping Sergei free the hatchet from the man’s grasp and subdue him as gently as they knew how. Stein got to her feet but otherwise stayed put, out of the crush of people pushing for the exits. She relaxed a bit, seeing Sergei and the other officer get the maniac under control. More security officers arrived to help subdue the man more thoroughly.
As they dragged the fellow away, Sergei left his colleagues and returned to Stein, his face flushed, a single scratch along his forehead. He smiled, and she hesitated a moment before hugging him, sensing it was the appropriate reaction. She couldn’t have been completely wrong; he hugged back. Chin resting on his shoulder, she watched the stars, suddenly clearer with the plastic safety barrier gone. Instinctively, she looked up again to the nearly–fixed north star, getting her first clear look at the sun their ancestors had left behind.
Two hundred and forty years had passed since then, as the ISMV Argos slowly plowed its way to the star called Tau Prius and its third planet. The bulk of that long voyage had been spent coasting, the engines sitting idle as generations of passengers lived and died within the confines of the vast ship. Six months of acceleration had gotten the Argos up to its cruising speed, and once set in rotation to provide a semblance of gravity for its inhabitants, the Argos was again little different than the inert rock it had been carved from. Though it now moved at five percent the speed of light — an admittedly glamorous life for a rock.
Thanks to the hard work of Isaac Newton, the end of the trip would look much like the beginning, with the ship, now flipped around, decelerating for six months. According to the original itinerary, April 3rd, 239 A.L. — the date currently displayed on the front of every terminal — was the day that the brakes were to be hit. But plans had changed.
The Argos was running late.
§
Stein let the door to her apartment close behind her and leaned back on it, exhaling. After leaving the observation lounge, the arch in Sergei’s eyebrow gave away his hope for what the rest of the evening had in store. But the near suicide and lingering smell of urine had left Stein feeling distinctly unsexy, and when she’d firmly told him she was going home, he hadn’t forced the issue.
“Smart guy,” she said to herself as she lurched across the apartment to the bathroom. Sergei was sweet. She performed some mental gymnastics, imagining more weeks and months, maybe even years, in his company. She probably would be pretty happy with him, based on what she understood the word ‘happy’ to mean. But for a variety of reasons — none of them very clear, even to her — she still didn’t seem terribly interested in letting that happen.
After a quick shower, she returned to the living room and slumped on the couch. Her eyes drifted up to the lamp embedded in the ceiling. She blinked. No secret messages. What the hell was that all about? It was definitely something. Unless it wasn’t. The shapes were muddled, but definitely looked like letters. VLAD. Probably Vlad. Who the hell is Vlad?
She had been to doctors before. They had never said a thing about anything unusual in her eyes. Not that they had been looking for VLAD. But those guys had no problem telling her about her other faults; if they had known her eyes belonged to someone called Vlad, they would have said so.
They hadn’t exposed her to a blinding blue light though. She hadn’t seen anything like that before either, during any of her aboveground or subterranean wanderings. She was confident none of the regular electrical or mechanical systems could make that kind of light, having seen most of those systems violently malfunction at one point or another in her life. Besides which, there was nothing terribly exotic in or around that room, equipment–wise. She tried to piece together the sequence of events that had led up to the light. She had bumped something in the corner. Some kind of booby trap? What kind of self–important maniac thought art that crappy was worth booby trapping? And what kind of booby trap blinded someone with strange messages about eastern Europeans?
Bruce would know. She decided she would tell him the next morning. It had been smart not to tell him immediately — he would probably have gone back there that night with welding goggles and a sledgehammer to plunder the room like some kind of contemporary Viking. No, she would let him get his beauty sleep.
Stein got up from the couch and crossed the room to Mr. Beefy, the potted meat plant in the corner of the room, and the sole other living creature in the apartment. Mr. Beefy was a steak plant, a smaller version of the monsters in the meat farms downstairs. A metal armature of braces and feeding tubes supported several dangling ‘fruits’ swaying slightly under her touch. She poked thoughtfully at a couple of them, then adjusted the nutrient settings on the panel mounted into the plant base. “You’re all right, Mr. Beefy. Steady, not too lippy. And you never want to know where ‘this’ is going.” She patted the tree gently, then went to bed.
Previously
Harold approached the first level of the hospital, coming to a stop just outside, dismayed by what he saw. The front doors were obstructed by a cleaning crew, a man and woman haphazardly swabbing the ground. The man was resting a large portion of his body weight on his mop, pushing it forward in straight lines before stopping and turning around, moving back and forth in a grid. The woman was using more of a slapping motion, bringing the mop head a short distance off the ground before slamming it back down, spraying water around. None of this appeared to be having any effect on the street, which didn’t even look that dirty in the first place. It never looked dirty, being made from that grey composite purposely designed to have that effect. A stack of plastic ‘Wet Floor’ signs lay to one side of them, unused.
“Hey, come on, guys. You should put those up when you’re doing that,” Harold complained as he approached them. He gestured at the signs. “There are people coming in and out of here on crutches.”
The slapper looked Harold up and down slowly, eyes lingering on the hem of his lab coat. “Fuck you, doc,” she said finally.
“Yeah. Right.” Harold shook his head and sidestepped the woman, entering the hospital basement behind her. They should be happy they even have a job. There were a lot of people on board who’d jump at the chance to mop perfectly clean floors. Seventy years into its voyage, the population of the Argos was going through its latest malaise. A ‘Crisis of Purpose’ was what the news feeds called it, usually when captioning a picture of someone fiddling with himself on a park bench.
Harold walked past the emergency room waiting area, down the hall, and into the elevator, riding it up to the fifth floor. Here, he walked past the nurse’s station to his office.
§
“Dr. Stein?”
Harold stopped and turned back to Cliff at the nurse’s desk. “Hey, Cliff. What’s up?”
“Dr. Kinison was looking for you. You just missed him.”
“Ahh, okay. Thanks.” Harold tried to think of a way to avoid the ship’s senior naval doctor for a bit longer. A soft vibration from his pocket as his terminal received an incoming message. He looked at it. A message from Kevin.
“How was your weekend?” Cliff asked.
“Hmm? Oh, good.” Harold looked up, distracted. “I went to see the new orchestra that’s just formed up.”
“Were they any good?”
Harold blinked, remembering the experience. “Wow. No. Still, nice to have a new way to kill time.”
“Isn’t that the truth.”
Harold smiled and backed away from the small talk as gracefully as he could. Some days he had more patience for it than others.
In his office, he tapped at the des
ktop display to bring up the latest genetic variance survey. The Argos had passed through a wave of extremely high–energy radiation a year earlier, and the damage, thought minor at first, had since gotten much, much worse. A host of growths, cysts, and other odd–looking complaints had swamped their front–line medical staff. A stalagmite erupting on the graph of cancer rates wasn’t even their greatest concern; with the tools available, cancer was easily treated and even more easily found. It was the subtler damage that was more worrying, and far harder to find.
He had closed the survey and opened up the code for one of his automatons when he remembered the message from Kevin and looked at his terminal. Nothing there. Frowning, he poked around the archive, looking for the message, not finding any trace of it. Kevin must have recalled it. Odd, but not a terribly big deal — if it was important, the boy would certainly send it again.
Setting his terminal down, Harold examined the code and began wrapping his head around the problem he’d been working on. He pulled up one of the trial genomes he’d been working on, sighed, then started the debugger. One at a time, he stepped through the changes his automaton would make once let loose. Pausing at the error he’d been stuck on for the past week, he growled, then leaned back in his chair, tugging at his beard.
With the long–term viability of the ship’s population at risk, the captain and mayor had stumbled into one of their rare agreements and ordered mandatory rounds of genetic screening to take place. Over 2000 nano–biopsies per individual, analyzed for statistical variations and compared against baseline samples stored in each individual’s file. What would be done with the problems found was as–yet undecided; the gene–tinkerers were able to repair the damage, but only on a small scale.
But that wasn’t Harold’s problem. The ship’s senior naval medical officer, Dr. Kinison, would be the one planning the triage. Harold just had to figure out a semi–automated procedure for making a single repair. Gene tinkering had always been done on a case–by–case basis, with multiple levels of human oversight for every change to the patient’s genome. They simply didn’t have enough time to do that for the entire population, a surprising problem on a ship where spare time was never in short supply.
“Which is why you need to smarten up,” Harold told the automaton, pointing at the screen accusingly, “and stop turning this guy into a flipper baby.”
Chapter 2: Sniffing
Plastic letters held in place by chipped brackets on the front of the locker announced that its contents belonged to L. Stein. Cast in green–gray plastic, its edges rounded off by decades of human erosion, the locker was equal parts ugly and homely. But it opened and closed and kept stuff inside of it, making it one of the few things on board the ship that could still claim to perform all of its assigned tasks well.
The Argos’s second–greatest burglar and assistant ship’s engineer yawned and yanked the door open past the point where it jammed. Inside hung a maintenance uniform, which she quickly changed into. The uniform itself had no distinguishing marks, notwithstanding the very distinguishing solid orange hue of the fabric. Every engineer and technician wore a similar one, though none were identical, depending on how well each owner took care of it. Other technicians began streaming in and changing. With nods and thin smiles, Stein acknowledged her colleagues as she put on her tool webbing. She closed the locker door, leaning into it, and left for the main office.
The maintenance office was wider and taller than most rooms on the Argos, thanks to its location on the unfashionable but roomy first level. Tool benches lined the back and side walls, bracketing the large table in the center of the room. The Big Board — essentially a wall–sized terminal — dominated one side of the room, displaying a list of the recent maintenance problems around the ship. Below that it displayed issues lingering from the previous day that had proven particularly troublesome to fix or that required repairs on a larger scale than a day or two. At the bottom of the list were months– and years–long projects and repairs. The Board displayed only a fraction of the known maintenance issues on board the Argos; many others, though very real, simply weren’t going to get fixed. If the Big Board were to display all the known faults on the ship, the wall would have had to be a half kilometer taller, which would necessitate a substantially larger ship to accommodate it, and the larger list of problems which would go with that, and so on.
Stein sat down in a battered chair, propped her feet up on the table, and examined the list of issues. As the team lead, she was responsible for allocating staff and resources to all newly identified problems, normally the chief engineer’s job, but Curts had been busy with other work over the past year. A few months earlier he’d offloaded the responsibility to her, an honor that she’d accepted with mixed feelings. She had the technical aptitude for it, just didn’t enjoy the demands the role placed on her soft skills.
All of the older and medium–term issues already had resources allocated to them, leaving all the problems identified in the past few hours for Stein to handle. Anything that couldn’t be fixed within that time would be communicated to Curts and the swing shift supervisor during the next shift change. Of the new issues, there were just under thirty heating and cooling problems that morning, making it fairly similar to the last several thousand mornings. Her eyes scanned the complaints, picking out the usual patterns. Two more residences around Europe–3–midships complaining about the chill. The floatarium was too hot. A whole slew of shops along Australia–2 complaining of stagnant air. Some bureaucrat says it’s too hot in America–3, right near the aft. Another one, next door, says it’s too cold. And finally, just as a bonus, someone in the garden well complaining. Probably a Whiner, but Stein didn’t recognize the name.
Keeping a ship the size of the Argos at a livable temperature wasn’t a terribly difficult task from a theoretical point of view. They had a reliable power source, in the form of two massive matter/antimatter reactors. And little heat had to be added in the first place — the Argos’s multi layered insulation was in excellent shape. It was mostly a matter of circulating air from the hot parts of the ship to the cold ones. This was no small task. Massive circulation fans, venting, and ductwork — having been installed for the job — were all constantly in the process of breaking down. Consequently, the maintenance team on board the Argos had been well occupied for the past two hundred and forty years. And even with the ship stopping soon, their role was still an important one — the Argos would stay at least partially populated for years to come.
“Who the fuck is complaining in the garden well?” Bruce said from behind Stein’s back. Stein turned, not showing any surprise at the stealthy arrival of her friend. Despite his bulk, Bruce had a natural affinity for moving quietly. “Like a fat whisper,” he had once bragged. She considered mentioning the strange light she’d observed the previous night, but seeing other technicians streaming into the room behind him, held her tongue.
She returned her gaze to the board and looked at the complaint he was referring to. “Janice Carow? No idea. Never seen the name before.”
“I’ll give her something to complain about,” Bruce said. He stroked his chin.
“Of course, Bruce. It’d be irresponsible of me if I didn’t let you rough up an old lady.”
Bruce then pantomimed grabbing a small woman and breaking her back over his knee. She laughed, then caught herself. She wasn’t worried for Ms. Carow’s safety — in all the years that they had been friends, she had never known Bruce to do anything more than threaten to break an old woman’s back. But she knew she shouldn’t encourage this too much further, not in front of the rest of the team. She moved to the front of the room, ignoring Bruce as he stood flexing over his imaginary victim’s shattered corpse. She took a deep breath. Being in charge sucked.
The rest of the maintenance team clustered around the Big Board, chatting. Stein cleared her throat. “Okay, everyone. Work.” She rubbed her face and looked at the Big Board. “Jean and Forth, you’re still working on the da
mper calibrations on L3. Rob, have a look at the Europe–3 problems — probably just air balancing again. After that, go help out Jean and Forth. Bruce, I want you to check out these stagnant air problems on Australia–2. After that, you can go see Ms. Carow in the well and find out what her beef is.”
“Oh, she’ll have some beef when I’m done with her.”
“Bruce,” Stein said firmly, shaking her head. “Be good.” She assigned the rest of the team their roles. Finally, she turned her attention to the last technician in the room.
“Gabelman, go check out the pencil pushers.” She gestured at the conflicting complaints from the government workers in the aft. “Remember these guys don’t want to hear what the problem is, or why they’re morons, or why no one will ever truly love them — even if it’s all true. Just tell them it will get fixed. They will give you shit, which you will accept, gladly. Do not, under any circumstances take any advice from Bruce on how to handle them.” The young technician had joined her team only a couple of weeks earlier, and after a couple mishaps, Stein had grudgingly started supplementing her instructions to him with tips on customer relations. It was all common sense, stuff he already should have known, and she was disdainful of having to mention it explicitly. But Curts had told her to, and open insubordination wasn’t her style; she preferred the casual, indifferent variety. Longer lasting, less likely to get her fired.
And none of them wanted to get fired. Challenging work though it was, roles in the maintenance department had long waiting lists and strict term limits. When the Argos was originally conceived and built, no one really knew how fifty thousand people were going to manage themselves in a confined space for over two hundred years; initially, most behaved like they were just on an extremely long vacation. But after a decade of tropical drinks, people began getting restless, and after a few highly festive riots, the ship’s leaders cobbled together an economic plan for the ship. A currency and limited free market was created, allowing enterprising sorts to busy themselves in the grand human tradition of gathering filthy lucre. On top of that, a system of job rotation was implemented for the meaningful — and thus highly desirable — positions in the public sector.
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