by Mur Lafferty
The captain laughed. “As I remember, a few of those countries would like a word with you too. And I can’t think of why I would sabotage cloning tech. I like clones.”
“Is that so? How many clones did you kill?” Wolfgang asked. “I only heard your reputation, not a number.”
“I was a soldier, Wolfgang. What’s your excuse?”
“I meant your number after you left the army.”
“Again,” she said with an edge to her voice. “Regardless of who I killed, I didn’t have a grudge against all of clonekind driving me.”
“You had your reasons. I had mine. What we both did was still murder. But that was a long time ago. And I accepted the gift of this journey: a clean slate. You’re not even supposed to bring past crimes up.”
“I am if it has relevance to the fact that we—and the thousands of people we carry on the ship—are dead in sixty or so years if we can’t figure out what happened and prevent it from happening again.”
Hiro felt cold sweat break out on his forehead. That fact was taking some time to sink in. Humans weren’t afraid of the specter of death that sat sixty years off; for a clone, it was terrifying. They were dead in the water. And Wolfgang put them there?
“We can’t be the only ones guilty of violent crimes,” Wolfgang said. “We need to figure out what everyone else is capable of.”
“Are you sure you’re not trying to shift the blame?” Katrina asked.
Another silence. A chair creaked. They must have relaxed enough to sit down.
“Captain, none of us knows what happened. It could have been you. It could have been me. We can’t be guilty of the crimes because we don’t have the memories of doing them.”
“That’s pretty impressive moral relativism,” she said, a sarcastic edge to her voice. “You should go into ethics and theology.”
He didn’t respond to that. Hiro wished he could see them. He edged closer.
“Do you wonder why they paired us together?” Katrina asked. “They had to know it wouldn’t be a good match if we learned who the other was.”
“I haven’t had time to wonder,” Wolfgang replied. “It’s possible they didn’t consider how we would work together.”
“They did all that psychological research in addition to studying our criminal records to make sure we would cooperate,” de la Cruz said. Then she added bitterly, “So we wouldn’t all kill each other once the isolation of deep space got to us.”
“Another system failure,” Wolfgang said.
“Add it to the list,” she replied.
Hiro reached the edge of the door and peeked in. The captain sat at her large desk, a majestic porthole out to deep space behind her. Wolfgang sat in the chair opposite, back to Hiro. He was leaning forward intently.
“I propose a truce,” he said. “We both were once hunters. We understand each other. The crew needs strong command. Until we find evidence, we point to no one.”
“We need the crew files,” she said. Hiro noticed she didn’t accept the truce.
“They’ve been wiped.”
“Joanna may have backups. She’s at least seen them,” Katrina said. “Go help her do the autopsies, get that information out of her.”
“And the truce?” Hah. Wolfgang had noticed it too.
“For now. We have bigger problems. We’re dying, Wolfgang. Nothing is as important as that.”
“Fine. I’ll talk to the doctor tonight,” Wolfgang said. His voice was getting louder. Belatedly Hiro realized he had to get out of the doorway or he’d be caught eavesdropping. He ran a few steps down the hall, turned, and started walking toward the captain’s office as if he had just gotten there.
Wolfgang nearly ran into him. “What are you doing out here?”
Hiro took a step back. “I had a question for the captain. I’m the only one she didn’t give an order to. I was going to go check out navigation again, but I wanted to know if she had other orders.”
Wolfgang stepped out of the doorway to let Hiro in. The captain sat at her desk, her back to them, looking at the rotating stars.
“Captain?” he asked.
“Has anyone collected the body in the helm?” Katrina said without turning around.
“Not that I know of,” Hiro said, dreading Katrina’s inevitable follow-up.
“Then go and cut it down and let Wolfgang take it to the medbay with the other bodies,” she said.
“Aye,” Hiro said, dread dripping from his voice.
“I’ll be right behind you in a moment,” Wolfgang said. “I need to talk to the captain a bit longer.”
Hiro exited the office, trying not to let his walk betray how badly he wanted to run the hell away. What did those two do?
A world without mindmapping technology at the ready was foreign to Hiro. Mindmapping technology had revolutionized cloning by allowing adults to be born with the full memories of the previous clone. Before then, genetically identical babies could be grown, but they would grow into whoever their environment shaped them to be.
But then people learned how to map the mind, not just the DNA.
In the old days, a machine took the mindmap while the subject was asleep. A person’s first mindmap could require weeks of going to the cloning clinic every night to fully map the brain, but once the technology improved, it was a matter of minutes. Subsequent mindmaps took a fresh look at the brain every time, needing only minutes to record a person’s new experiences, memories, and emotional growth.
The modern era of cloning was born. Or woken, some might say.
The problems of security came up soon after, since mindmapping tech could allow scientists to read some of the key parts of someone’s personality as clearly as they could read genetic abnormalities in DNA. The best mindmapping scientists could figure out that you were a compulsive liar as a child, and your first time lying had been when you were four, but they wouldn’t be able to tell you what that lie had been.
Despite that gossamer covering of privacy, a good mindmapper could tell an awful lot about a person. And a really good one could sever those connections, letting those memories, experiences, or triggered responses go floating off untethered to eventually fade away. These scientists eventually got the moniker mind hackers and were reviled or sought after, depending on where you were in society and how much money you had.
Some mind hacking was done to erase the effects of debilitating PTSD. Some people went into DNA hacking to resolve genetic abnormalities. Some had the legitimate (but mind-numbingly easy) job of making the clones sterile on a DNA level as the law required.
And some just went rogue and hacked whatever the highest bidder wanted them to. Luckily, high-level mindmapping was difficult, and not many people could do it well. Most of the best hackers went underground after the Codicils were passed.
At this moment the Dormire was unable to make new mindmaps or clones. If someone died, the only map they would have available would be the one they had made when the voyage started.
Hiro considered all of this as he headed back to the helm, the silent Wolfgang behind him. That backup they all made at the beginning of the journey: If all IAN’s logs had been wiped, where did that specific backup come from?
“He was eavesdropping,” Wolfgang said.
Katrina nodded. “That’s obvious. Why didn’t you confront him?”
“I’d like to see what happens,” Wolfgang said.
“A reactionary,” Katrina sneered. “Unsurprising.”
“Believe it or not, I learn from mistakes,” he said. “Running headlong into things before you have all the information, that’s foolhardy.”
She waved away his statement as if it were stale smoke. “Fine. Let’s see how he takes this information. If he reveals what he heard, we unite and throw him in the brig for mutiny. If he doesn’t, then we just watch him.”
Hiro had just forced Wolfgang to ally with the captain. Damn him.
“We’re on a ship of criminals.” The captain sighed and sat back. Her face ha
d the look of a twenty-year-old woman, but dark smudges had appeared under her eyes, and the worry inside them reflected decades of experience. “It looks like we might have more than one murderer. And why did it happen twenty-five years into the mission? If the person had wanted to sabotage the ship, why not do it right away? We’ve been a crew that has presumably worked together for decades. What did we do wrong to bring all of it down?”
“After all I’ve been through, to be damned to die in deep space, with nothing to show for our mission but some floating blood and vomit,” Wolfgang said.
Katrina’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “You don’t have the market cornered on difficult lives. Maybe that’s what Hiro was thinking when he hanged himself.”
“Do you think he did it?” Wolfgang said. “We need to still follow the Codicils even in space. We wouldn’t have been able to wake a new Hiro if we knew that’s what happened.”
Katrina snorted. “I think there are several laws to worry about ahead of a suicide. Anyway, the Codicils were made because the humans couldn’t handle us having lives they couldn’t comprehend. Why keep with their laws now that we’re free?”
“I find many things wrong with that statement. But that is a debate for a time of less chaos,” Wolfgang said. “Still—we will debate it. Some terrible things happened to force those Codicils into practice. I have some history texts to show you.”
“Back to the matter at hand. You will work with Joanna to get the criminal pasts of each clone. I will work with the techies to fix our cloning tech.”
“Can we trust them?” Wolfgang asked, waving his hand to indicate the rest of the ship.
“We don’t have a choice. We need to stay alive. When we figure things out, then we can have the luxury of accusing people.”
“You accused me ten minutes ago,” he reminded her.
“And you rightly talked me out of it,” she said, smiling slightly and sticking out her hand. “Lucky for you. For now, truce.”
He looked at the hand and remembered everything it had done over the years. He thought about the future, then, and what it would take to survive it. With distaste, he shook it.
The grisly reminder of his failure hung above Hiro’s head. He refused to look up or acknowledge it until Wolfgang got there. The ship was still accelerating and getting back on course, to his relief. He began studying the readout at the pilot’s terminal. It wasn’t telling him much, only the newest information that had come in the past hour.
He wished he could figure out who accessed navigation to throw the ship off course. But with no log files, they were out of luck.
Wolfgang entered the helm. “What’s your status?”
“Same old,” he said. “Just making sure we’re still on course. Haven’t figured out anything else. Do—do you need help with the body?”
“No,” Wolfgang said. He had already climbed the ladder to the bench and was unclipping the carabiner that held the cable in place. Hiro’s body fell, landing with a soft thump on the floor. Hiro tried not to look at his purple, bulging face. His eyes landed instead on the boot, discarded in the corner.
Wolfgang saw where he was looking. “Why do you think that happened?” he asked.
Hiro shrugged. “I lace my boots tightly. It’s not as if I could have kicked them off in death throes.”
“It looks like you died first,” Wolfgang said, pushing himself off the bench to land lightly beside the body. “Add it to the pile.”
“That’s clever of you,” Hiro heard himself say. “Considering that all the poor bastards in the bay are cut up and couldn’t have come out here to hang me after they all conveniently died.”
Wolfgang had bent to pick up the body, but he slowed. “I don’t think you understand the weight of this situation. Otherwise you wouldn’t be so flip.”
Hiro shrugged. “We probably all got really mad at each other. The scientists who made this thing worried that it would be hard living together for so long.”
“This is too big for a crime of passion anyway. Too many variables.”
“Maybe one of us has complicated passions,” Hiro said, writing a note on a tablet he had retrieved from the middle of the floor. “You never know. And you probably will never know.”
“If you’re not going to help, then at least stay quiet,” Wolfgang said, lifting the body easily.
“You’ve got it taken care of; go solve your crimes, genius,” Hiro said. He bet himself he could get Wolfgang to hit him. And then things would get fun. He opened his mouth to mention what he had heard in the helm, but Wolfgang’s long-fingered hand closed around his jaw and he made a startled erk noise.
“Shut the fuck up and do your job,” Wolfgang said, and he left the bridge.
“Maybe you shouldn’t leave me alone?” he called after Wolfgang. “I could snap and go a-murdering if left by my lonesome!”
Hiro bit his tongue sharply on the left side. The pain was shocking, terrific, and the taste of blood filled his mouth. He knew from experience that he was actually bleeding very little, despite the overwhelmingly copper taste. The desire to bait Wolfgang left him, and he sat in shame, reading the navigation charts.
The problem with this job was that IAN was meant to handle the Dormire. It was a lot easier just to have the computer drive the ship and not let pesky things like human error mess with it. But as the higher-ups dealt with the important life-threatening mysteries, like how they were going to make new clones for the next time someone went on a murderous spree, Hiro wanted to know where they were supposed to be going when they headed off course. A course correction of this magnitude would have to be planned.
He guessed that this was the captain’s problem. Well, it was a problem for all of them, but it was the captain’s job to make the decisions on how to handle it. Hiro checked the solar sail and made sure it was focused in the right direction for maximum radiation soakage. It was. He checked their trajectory. They were doing fine.
Maybe I can do this job without the AI.
He began to get a terrible thought in his head, but he squashed it, as he often did his terrible thoughts. People usually didn’t like Hiro when he thought terrible thoughts. And Hiro didn’t like it when people didn’t like him.
They’d been slowing down and turning toward something. Or away from something. A generational starship with the hopes and dreams of thousands of humans and clones and they were going…somewhere new.
Once he was satisfied with the navigation numbers, Hiro searched and tidied the helm thoroughly. Tablets, a jacket, and some trash had been displaced when the grav drive went offline, but clues were not to be found.
He did discover an empty stainless-steel mug that had gotten wedged under the console. He wondered if he had gotten so sloppy; drinking liquids from a mug was a bad habit to develop in space. The cloning bay’s consoles were protected against liquid damage, but the helm was not. Zero-g incidents plus liquid plus computers equaled a bad situation. He didn’t even want to think of what would happen if the captain found Paul drinking near the mindmap servers. He imagined another scene of carnage.
Still under the console, Hiro saw a blinking green light. He got farther under and lay flat on his back so he could better reach the underside of the nav computer.
“Bingo, motherfucker,” he whispered.
A drive had been inserted, something he was fairly sure wasn’t supposed to be there. This was his computer, after all, and he clearly remembered the tour as if it were a few hours before.
He popped back up to his terminal and searched to access the drive, but he didn’t find it anywhere. So it hadn’t been what had overridden the autopilot and possibly IAN himself.
Near as he could tell, the device was just a storage drive. That wouldn’t have been powerful enough to damage the ship. Why was it plugged in, hidden away here?
He should tell the captain. This might be important information. A sardonic voice surfaced, telling him that they were all suspects here, including the captain, and he shou
ldn’t tell her anything.
If they all started acting like that, they might as well fall on one another like rabid dogs right here and now, he told the voice firmly.
The captain needed to know about it. Paul would best understand it. Wolfgang would demand to know whatever the captain did. That left the necessity of keeping it secret from the doctor and Maria. Because they were the biggest threats? He rolled his eyes.
You’re not what you present to them. Don’t be so quick to write them off as harmless, not now. He sighed, knowing he was right.
Then he pulled the drive out and pocketed it anyway.
Spymaster Teapot
Generations ago, Maria Arena decided that cloning gave her the perfect opportunity to study everything she’d ever been interested in. “There’s not enough time” was no excuse to a clone. Time was all she had, and she used it as well as she could to study every esoteric thing that interested her.
While studying the cultural influence of food, she had written her master’s thesis on tea. Tea had changed the world, and if inanimate objects suddenly became sentient, Maria was sure that the teapots that resided in most world leaders’ offices could inform the most effective coup ever.
Unless the teapots were spymasters. Then they would destroy the world from the inside.
She felt betrayed when her admittedly quite liberal adviser made her edit the thesis to remove her projections about the eventual anthropomorphic teapot overthrow of the world. He had calmly given her the address of an adviser for the creative writing department, and she finally demurred. She had been disappointed, but kept a copy of the deleted section with her private files, as was her habit.
Her love of food, both the history and the actual consumption, had made Maria suited to take the lowly position of junior engineer, which meant “Jack of All Trades,” which included ship’s cook. If running a food printer could be called “cooking.” Although the stress of waking up compounded with the stress of the murdered bodies around them all was considerable, the captain had been right that the team would need sustenance, and she needed to get the food printer running as soon as possible.
