Six Wakes

by Mur Lafferty

  “Are you able to turn it on without IAN?” Maria asked.

  “I should be. IAN could control everything, but if he goes offline, we’re not dead in the water. Was that my shoe?” The last question was offhand, as if it meant nothing.

  “Yes.” Maria drifted toward the top of the helm and took a closer look at the body. It was hard to tell since the face was so distorted by the hanging, but Hiro looked different from the rest of the crew. They all looked as if decades had passed since they had launched from Luna station. But Hiro looked exactly as he did now, as if freshly vatted.

  “Hey, Hiro, I think you must have died at least once during the trip. Probably recently. This is a newer clone than the others,” she said. “I think we’re going to have to start writing the weird stuff down.”

  Hiro made a sound like an animal caught in a trap. All humor had left him. His eyes were hard as he finally glanced up at her and the clone. “All right. That’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  “The last straw. I’m officially scared now.”

  “Now? It took you this long to get scared?” Maria asked, pulling herself to the floor. “With everything else we’re dealing with, now you’re scared?”

  Hiro punched at the terminal, harder than Maria thought was necessary. Nothing happened. He crossed his arms, and then uncrossed them, looking as if arms were some kind of new limb he wasn’t sure what to do with. He took the boot from Maria and slid it over his own foot.

  “I was just managing to cope with the rest,” he said. “That was something happening to all of you. I wasn’t involved. I wasn’t a Saturday Night Gorefest. I was here as a supporting, friendly face. I was here to make you laugh. Hey, Hiro will always cheer us up.”

  Maria put her hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eyes. “Welcome to the panic room, Hiro. We have to support each other. Take a deep breath. Now we need to get the drive on and then tell the captain and Wolfgang.”

  “You gotta be desperate if you want to tell Wolfgang,” he said, looking as if he was trying and failing to force a smile.

  “And when you get the drive on, can you find out what year it is, check on the cargo, maybe reach IAN from here?” Maria asked. “With everything else that’s happened, it might be nice to come back with a little bit of good news. Or improved news.”

  Hiro nodded, his mouth closed as if trying to hold in something he would regret saying. Or perhaps a scream. He floated over to his pilot’s chair and strapped himself in. The console screen continued to blink bright red at him. “Thanks for that warning, IAN, we hadn’t noticed the drive was gone.”

  He typed some commands and poked at the touch screen. A warning siren began to bleat through the ship, telling everyone floating in zero-g that gravity was incoming. Hiro poked at the screen a few more times, and then typed at a terminal, his face growing darker as he did so. He made some calculations and then sighed loudly, sitting back in the chair and putting his hands over his face.

  “Well,” he said. “Things just got worse.”

  Maria heard the grav drive come online, and the ship shuddered as the engines started rotating the five-hundred-thousand-GRT ship. She took hold of the ladder along the back wall to guide her way to the bench so she wouldn’t fall once the gravity came back.

  “What now?” she said. “Are we off course?”

  “We’ve apparently been in space for twenty-four years and seven months.” He paused. “And nine days.”

  Maria did the math. “So it’s 2493.”

  “By now we should be a little more than three light-years away from home. Far outside the event horizon of realistic communication with Earth. And we are. But we’re also twelve degrees off course.”

  “That…sorry, I don’t get where the hell that is. Can you say it in maintenance-officer language?”

  “We are slowing down and turning. I’m not looking forward to telling the captain,” he said, unstrapping himself from the seat. He glanced up at his own body drifting at the end of the noose like a grisly kite. “We can cut that down later.”

  “What were we thinking? Why would we go off course?” Maria thought aloud as they made their way through the hallway, staying low to prepare for gravity as the ship’s rotation picked up.

  “Why murder the crew, why turn off the grav drive, why spare the captain, why did I kill myself, and why did I apparently feel the need to take off one shoe before doing it?” Hiro said. “Just add it to your list, Maria. I’m pretty sure we are officially fucked, no matter what the answers are.”

  Diamonds

  The only part of the Dormire’s mission that hadn’t gone wrong, apparently, was the state of the cargo.

  While the ship carried her skeleton crew, within the hold were two thousand humans sleeping in cryo. Within the servers in the hold were over five hundred clone mindmaps. Maria and the other five were responsible for over twenty-five hundred lives.

  Maria didn’t like to dwell on the responsibility. She was just happy to hear Hiro confirm that all their passengers were still stable and that the backups were uncorrupted.

  Each human and clone passenger had reasons for coming on the journey: Adventure and exploration drove many of the humans; escaping religious persecution drove many of the clones. Between the two groups, a fair number of political and corporate exiles traveled to escape jail, indentured servitude, or worse.

  All of them were driven in part by the fact that the Earth was losing habitable land as the oceans rose, and territorial and water wars were breaking out worldwide. So the rich, as always, left because they could.

  The reasons the crew were on the ship, however, were slightly different. Each had the simple motivation of being a criminal attempting to wipe the record clean.

  Their destination, the planet Artemis, was fully habitable, a bit smaller than Earth, and seemed like paradise. It orbited Tau Ceti, in the constellation Cetus.

  Maria doubted their paradise would result in humans and clones living together much better than they had on Earth, but people had rosy dreams and big ideas.

  “Have you ever attempted suicide?” Hiro asked as they carried the jumpsuits and chair back to the cloning bay.

  “That’s pretty personal,” Maria said, running the fingers of one hand through her long hair and grimacing at the sticky mats she encountered.

  He shrugged. “You just saw my answer hanging above us. I’m pretty sure that when all of this is done, Wolfgang will decide what to do with that little detail of today’s misadventures. Earth cloning laws aren’t going to be ignored out here—they made that pretty clear before we left.”

  Maria wondered about his criminal past. She sighed. “I did attempt it. Once.”

  “What stopped you?” He didn’t ask if she had succeeded; if she had, she wouldn’t have had legal right to wake up her next clone.

  “A friend talked me down,” she said. “Isn’t that what usually happens?”

  “Wish I’d had a friend a few hours ago,” he said.

  “You’d likely still be dead, just in there,” she said, pointing to the cloning bay.

  “But I wouldn’t be a suicide. I think Wolfgang’s looking anywhere for someone to blame for this.”

  “You’re here now. Let’s take care of the immediate problems. Then we’ll figure out what happened to us all,” Maria said.

  The captain’s voice drifted down the hall, a cry of disgust.

  “Whose idea was it to turn the grav drive on?” she shouted.

  “Yours, Captain,” Hiro said as they entered. “You wanted to be able to stand on solid ground.”

  The cloning bay still looked like a nightmare, but at least it was a nightmare under the rule of gravity. Dodging bodies and biohazardous human waste was a situation she never wanted to even think about again. Maria and Hiro had tried to prepare themselves for the new gravity-affected view of the slaughter, but the dead bodies bouncing around the floor—gravity was not yet strong enough to let them stay where they fell—turned out
to nauseate them in a new way. The blood and other fluids had splattered on the floor and walls, and some on the crew themselves. Maybe Paul had been smart to want to stay in his vat.

  “It was rhetorical,” she said, holding on to the wall and bracing herself on the floor. “I didn’t know it would be this bad. So what did you learn? Did you have any problems without IAN? Or could you access him from the bridge?”

  “IAN is still down, Captain,” Hiro said. “Luckily for us, in the unlikely occurrence that IAN is down, the helm unlocks. Otherwise, it’s suicide. Or genocide. Is it genocide if we kill everyone on board?”

  Maria winced.

  “Speaking of which, all of our cryo-passengers are alive and accounted for. One bit of good news, right? Yay?” Hiro ventured a smile. Katrina didn’t return it.

  The captain turned to Maria. “Give me a less chaotic report.”

  Maria swallowed. “I’m not sure what Hiro did, but it didn’t take him much time to get the grav drive working again and access the nav computer and check on everything. Anyway, we have more important news.”

  “Here, let me.” Hiro held out his hand and counted off his fingers. “We’ve been in space close to twenty-five years. We’re twelve degrees off course and slower than we should be going. Not to mention—”

  “Did you correct the course?” Katrina interrupted.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It will take a while to get back, of course, but I righted our direction.”

  As Hiro was letting the captain know their situation, Maria quietly passed out jumpsuits. Wolfgang snatched two without looking at her, thrusting one at Paul—who had grabbed instead for Joanna’s wheelchair and was steadying himself with one hand on his vat and the chair in the other, shielding himself. Joanna took Paul’s suit from Wolfgang and traded it to him for her chair with a kind smile. Dr. Glass accepted her suit with a smile, slid into it with practiced ease, and climbed into her new wheelchair. She steadied herself against a cloning vat until the gravity increased to keep her stable on the ground. The legs of her jumpsuit drifted lazily from her tiny legs.

  “Want something to tie those up so they don’t drag?” Maria asked, pointing at the dangling cuffs.

  “Thanks, but no,” Dr. Glass said, pulling them in and tucking them neatly under her. “I’ll go and get my other prosthetics from my room later. Or my crutches. When this calms down.” She waved her hand at the horror show around them.

  Maria followed her gesture, at the bouncing bodies, the splattered gore, the frazzled crew. “I’m not sure when this is going to calm down. There’s a lot of stuff going on.”

  Joanna quirked an eyebrow. “You mean there’s more?”

  Maria grimaced and pointed to the captain, who was hearing the story about them discovering Hiro’s body. She moved to stand beside him. The gravity was improving, bit by bit, as the drive got the ship turning fast enough.

  “It looks like suicide,” Hiro said, avoiding the captain’s eyes.

  “But we don’t know anything for sure right now,” Maria added. “He’s also younger than all of our clones.”

  Joanna held up a finger. “That on the surface means nothing worrisome; he could have died recently for any number of reasons.”

  “We won’t know if it’s suicide without examining the body,” Wolfgang said.

  Hiro looked at him, surprised. Maria hadn’t expected Wolfgang to give him the benefit of the doubt either.

  “There’s one more thing,“ Hiro said, looking at Maria.

  So it was her turn to deliver the bad news. She sighed and squared her shoulders. “The big news,” she said to Katrina, “is your previous clone isn’t dead. She’s in medbay in a coma.”

  The captain said nothing, but the color drained from her face and her lips pursed tightly together. She looked at Paul as if this whole thing was his fault. “Enough. You get to work. Hiro, Joanna, with me to the medbay. Wolfgang, you’re in charge here.”

  Paul stood, now fully clothed, staring at Katrina. He had stopped sobbing, but he still shook slightly. The thick synth-amneo drained off his hair as the gravity slowly returned. He didn’t move.

  “Doc, that’s not normal, is it?” Maria asked, jabbing her thumb at the frightened man.

  “On rare occasions, a clone can have a bad reaction to waking up,” Joanna said. “It’s not unlike waking from a nightmare, being disoriented and not knowing what is real.”

  “Only this time he woke up to a nightmare. Poor guy,” Maria said.

  “Captain, a moment, please,” Joanna said, and pushed her chair carefully toward Paul.

  One of the best things about cloning was that, even if there were no modifications done to the genes, each clone came out in the best possible shape at peak physical age. Maria remembered Paul as a mid-forties white man with a large belly and poorly cut blond hair. His arms were covered with dark spots like mosquito bites that he scratched nervously so they never healed. He wore a full beard and greatly disliked the tight (to him) jumpsuits that they were forced to wear as uniforms.

  None of that Paul was here now. The only resemblance was the wide, watery blue eyes that stared out from a strong face, clean skin with a few moles and freckles, and a toned body. Not bodybuilder-toned but certainly not someone Maria would kick out of bed. If he were not looking on the verge of a breakdown.

  “Paul, we need you to step up and do your job,” Joanna said calmly. “If there’s a problem with this current body or mindmap, you need to let me know right now. Otherwise we need you to get IAN online.”

  Wolfgang raised a white eyebrow. “You think I didn’t tell him that already?”

  “You used different wording,” Joanna said, not looking at him. She gently reached out and touched Paul’s hand.

  He jerked it away from her. “Y’all could have given me a little privacy,” he said hoarsely.

  “Privacy?” snorted Wolfgang.

  “That’s ridiculous. If you ever want a checkup, you’ll have to get used to getting treated by me,” Joanna said.

  Paul looked at his corpse, his face turning a bit green. The body that lay tethered to the others on the cold floor; the one with multiple bruises in his neck was more like the one Maria remembered, only older. He looked worn; space and time had not been kind to him, as he weighed even more than her memory. He wore a ratty T-shirt of a band long dead, and his jumpsuit was zipped only to his waist. The top half of the suit draped behind him as if his ass had its own cape.

  The living Paul gulped and looked up. “What—”

  “Happened? You know as much as we do. That’s what we’re trying to figure out, and that’s why you need to figure out what’s wrong with our AI.”

  He nodded once and focused on the console across the bay. “I can do that.” Stumbling, he walked past them and gave the dead bodies a wide berth to get to the terminal where they could access IAN.

  Wolfgang bent to examine the corpses.

  Joanna nodded. “Ready, Captain.”

  Katrina led the way down the corridor, Hiro pushing Joanna’s clumsily bouncing wheelchair down the hall behind her. Hiro thought that the doctor would have preferred to wait for the ship to achieve full gravity before they moved, but she didn’t complain.

  When they took the turn in the corridor toward the medbay, Joanna called out for Katrina to stop. “Take a moment before you go in there. This kind of thing can be quite upsetting.”

  “What of the many kinds of things we’ve seen today are you referring to?” Katrina asked with a touch of acid in her voice.

  “Encountering your previous clone,” Joanna said.

  “How many times has it happened before? Unless I didn’t hear of new codicils, having a second clone is highly illegal, right?”

  “Well, so’s murder, but that doesn’t stop people,” Hiro said, forcing lightness into his voice.

  The captain’s body was stiff as she forced herself to slow down for Hiro and Joanna to catch up. In another situation, Hiro would have been amused to watch her
internal struggle, but he was busy wondering how he would feel in this situation. This specific one, anyway.

  He doubted he would react well. Finding his own body dead of apparent suicide in the helm was enough to prove that.

  Currently the captain was in the situation where a clone was alive who had memories she didn’t share. There would be legal and moral considerations as to who retained the right to the very being of Katrina de la Cruz. Fighting for the right to lead the ship would be inevitable, but that would likely be only the first of such battles.

  Or they could just read the law exactly as it was written, and terminate the older clone. That sometimes happened too.

  IAN could have helped them with this decision, but, well, that was a current dead end.

  They entered the medbay. The captain walked right up to the bed and looked down at her own older, comatose body. Her skin paled, then darkened, and her lips went white. She took a sharp intake of breath and turned her back, facing Hiro and Joanna. “Recycle it.”

  Joanna gaped at her. “That’s all you have to say? That’s a person lying there.”

  “Legally, the moment I woke up, that became just a shell,” Katrina said. “Recycle it.” Striding as purposefully as she could in the low gravity, she left the medbay.

  “See, that’s what I told Maria she would say,” Hiro said, glancing at Joanna. “But I think we need her.”

  Joanna nodded. “Our only witness.” She moved to check the readings on the terminal beside the bed.

  “Seems unethical, besides.”

  The doctor rubbed her face. “I hate these problems. There’s never a good answer. Can you check and see if my spare set of prosthetics are here?”

  “How often have you had this kind of problem?” Hiro asked as he looked around the medbay while Joanna rooted through a drawer. She pulled out a tablet and turned it on.

  “We are given a number of clone-specific ethical questions in med school,” she said. “This is only one of them. We studied things like how to deal with mind hackers who botch a job, or do too good a job. How to judge if a clone’s early death is suicide. Who to blame if someone is cloned against their will or at the wrong time. We had a whole year on ethics.”