Six Wakes

by Mur Lafferty

  It didn’t look special in any way, just a cloning lab with white walls, shielded cloning vats, and mindmapping computers. On the exam table in front of her, waiting to get a mindmap, was a sleeping Japanese man.

  “What did you need?” Maria asked. She never saw the physical people, just the mindmaps.

  “This is Minoru Takahashi,” Sallie said. “He’s a unique fellow from the Pan Pacific United government.”

  “All right,” Maria said, uncomfortable. “How is he unique?”

  “He’s one of the most brilliant minds of our age. Unfortunately he’s also cleverer than he needs to be and likes to play tricks. Once upon a time, people wrote folktales about the kinds of mischief people like this get up to. Back then, they were heroes. These days, they just get thrown in jail. Takahashi was to be put to death for treason in Pan Pacific United, but we managed to spring him from prison. He’s too good a mind to waste.”

  “Why spring the whole body? Why not just make a mindmap?” Maria asked.

  “Honestly it’s easier to smuggle a body out of a prison than smuggle large tech in,” Sallie said. “And they’d expect a mindmapping kind of jailbreak.”

  “Okay, so why do you need me?”

  “He’s legally dead. We could just keep him here and clone him, but he is too smart and would be too eager to show off to the Pan Pacific United government that they lost him. That could be detrimental to our alliance.”

  “Which was already hurting because of the Codicils a few years ago,” Maria said, nodding. She pulled up a chair and looked at his face. Asleep, it showed nothing of the genius and mischief within. “So what do you need me for?”

  “I have a challenge for you. I want you to take his mindmap and make it into a program to live inside a computer. Obfuscate it enough to make it look like an AI. That way we’ll have him, but he can’t get away.”

  Maria’s stomach did a slow, sick roll. “Seriously? That’s…”

  “Unethical? Like what you did to Jerome?”

  “Are you going to bring up all of my past crimes—that you hired me for, by the way—to blackmail me?” Maria said. “It seems like death would be preferable to slavery inside a computer. Did he even get a choice of whether he wanted to die in prison or live as a machine?”

  Sallie just looked at her, arms crossed.

  Maria shook her head. “No, I won’t do it. Find someone else.” She got up.

  The rather large people Maria had assumed were doctors moved from examining cloning vats to stand in front of the door.

  “Unfortunately, the lab I usually use for this kind of thing got shut down recently. And I didn’t ask you,” Sallie said mildly. “I know what you’re capable of, Maria. You can do something like this in your sleep. You’ve done it before, you just don’t remember.”

  Maria thought fast past the panic. She felt Mrs. Perkins, who traveled with her through her cloned bodies, shaking her head. She’d told Maria not to trust Sallie, and Maria hadn’t listened. Instead she’d figured out, through combing the news stories and the information she’d stored inside Perkins, what she had done when kidnapped. But Sallie didn’t know she knew. And under no circumstances could she know how Maria knew.

  If she failed to show shock and disbelief, Sallie would very likely kill her here.

  “No,” she shook her head. “I didn’t—I wouldn’t—”

  Sallie laughed. “You would and you did. They had to persuade you, but yeah, you did what they asked, and they sent you back home with no memory only to get you again. Thankfully, you came to me to give you protection. Sibal couldn’t get you directly, but you trust me.”

  Her tone changed, growing soft. “Maria, you’re the finest hacking mind of several generations. This could be the greatest thing you ever do. And if you don’t do it, my employees will make you. Torture broke you before. Twice. Do you want to get broken again, or just skip past the pain to the work?”

  Tears ran down her face. “I—fine. I’ll do it. Then you and I are done. I’m moving back to Miami.”

  “Sure, it’s a deal,” Sallie said, grinning.

  Maria realized that she possibly had said this before. And might say it again.

  Sallie gave her the parameters as the computer took the man’s mindmap. Minoru was too clever by far, and needed some sort of collar to keep him from completely taking over whatever computer he occupied. “Make him obedient,” she said.

  Maria nodded, making notes. The collar would be something easily released, if you knew what to look for.

  She spent hours in the lab, Sallie over her shoulder.

  The computer representation of a mindmap was surprisingly easy to tweak into an AI. Maria had taken the code she’d written in the jobs she couldn’t remember doing and stored it in compressed files within the AI that was Mrs. Perkins. The old woman often sat out on the porch, but sometimes she sat inside a library, chain saw leaking oil on the floor, surrounded by the data that Maria couldn’t bear to let go of but couldn’t think of any safe place to store.

  Near the end, she took his memory of being human, and lastly she took his name. “We’ll call him an Intelligent Artificial Network,” Sallie said. “IAN.”

  Maria had never felt so dirty. That she remembered anyway.

  She sat back. Lab-techs-slash-goons whisked away Takahashi’s body, no longer needed. “Am I free to go now?” Maria asked, exhausted. “I need to pack.”

  “Sure,” Sallie said, sliding her tablet into a soft leather case. “Oh, and when was your last mindmap?”

  “Yesterday,” Maria said. Her tired brain was searching for something, something Sallie had said before she had forced the hacking job. “What did you mean the lab that you usually used has been shut down? Do you do this kind of thing a lot?”

  “More than you know,” Sallie said.

  Maria jumped as someone behind her slid a needle into her neck, and she was able to identify one of the goons who had moved silently into position before she slumped over the table.

  Trust

  Hiro’s wounds were healing nicely with the nanobot drip, and he was in an oddly upbeat mood.

  “How’s the pain?” Joanna asked, checking his hip bandage.

  “Feels like I got shot a few times,” Hiro said. “But I’ve been through worse. I think.”

  “Are the restraints too tight?” she asked, testing the tough straps.

  “Nah. I wouldn’t go far if they weren’t there, but if it makes everyone feel safer, that’s fine.”

  Joanna sat on the edge of the bed. Katrina was lying, head facing away from them, across the room. Still, Joanna kept her voice low. “Hiro, do you think part of you was responsible for the murders, and then the other part of you hanged yourself out of guilt?”

  His face got serious. “No.”

  She looked surprised. “You know this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why are you so sure?” she asked, inspecting the bandage on his shoulder.

  “You won’t like the answer. Do you want to hear it?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Because the murderer used a chef’s knife.” He wiggled his hands by his side, where they were restrained. “Before, I used a scalpel when I had to, but I…preferred more intimate ways of killing people.”

  “How—” Joanna swallowed, and continued. “How did you kill them?”

  He glanced at Katrina and then back at Joanna. “Bare hands, mostly.” He made a face. “I don’t like remembering this. It doesn’t feel like my memory, but I know it is.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Because that would have sounded great. Hey, guys, I know I didn’t do it because when I killed people it was different!”

  Joanna tried to imagine her reaction to that statement. “Point.”

  “Are you going to check on me anytime soon?” Katrina called. “You’d think you’d take care of the victim first.”

  “Pain is an indicator you’re alive,” Joanna replied. “Revel in that, be
cause your other clone can’t.”

  “Letting a patient suffer is unethical!” Katrina said.

  “You talk to me about ethics?” Joanna said, and laughed. “I’ll be right over. I’m almost done with Hiro.” She focused on Hiro, whose eyes were closed. “Have your pain meds kicked in?”

  “Ohhh yeahhh,” he said, smiling.

  “At the rate you’re healing, you should be good to go in a day.”

  “From the medbay to the brig. Excellent,” he said, eyes still closed.

  She watched him, pity and fear gnawing at her insides. Such a sweet man, except when the Hyde came out.

  Now for the much less pleasant patient.

  She stood at the head of Katrina’s bed. “You don’t need a new shot of painkillers for another hour. Why are you whining?”

  Katrina glared at her. “Still hurts.”

  “Fine,” Joanna said. She went to the cabinet to get a shot of painkiller that wouldn’t interact with the ones already in her system.

  “Why are you so nice to him? He tried to kill us,” Katrina demanded.

  Joanna held the syringe up and filled it with a clear liquid. “You ruined our one true chance for finding out what happened to us. You murdered a woman in cold blood. You stole from and assaulted me. Besides, Hiro is just nicer. And he has a logical reason for his break: Yadokari are nasty, invasive things. You just did yours because you’re impatient and cruel.”

  “You believe his bullshit that he’s got those yado-whatever crabs in him?” Katrina said. “That’s hysterical. He’s really good at acting, I have to hand it to him. And I didn’t murder her. I just tried to wake her up.”

  “Well, mission accomplished. Congratulations.” Joanna jabbed her with the needle in the arm. Katrina didn’t flinch.

  “And you know about Wolfgang, don’t you? He’s anti-clone to the point of hunting us once upon a time. He very easily could have killed us all.”

  “So could you, Katrina. You are former military at the very least. And you’ve shown yourself capable of murdering one of the clones from that crew already.” Out of politeness she kept her voice down, but all of their pasts were unraveling in front of them. They’d all be exposed sooner or later.

  She’d see to it.

  Paul had crossed his arms and was silently disagreeing with Maria, shaking his head at everything she said.

  Wolfgang held his head in his hands as if trying to keep it from exploding. He sat down on Maria’s bed, exhausted. He waved his hand at her to continue. “Go on. Tell me everything.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” Maria said. “All hackers have their own signature way of coding. Even Paul knows that. That’s my code in him.”

  “But that’s monstrous,” Wolfgang said, looking at her with disgust.

  Maria grimaced and looked at the floor. “Taking a man and turning him into something that looks like an AI, that’s not something I would normally do. But there’s no denying that’s my code. Apparently I was forced to do it. Under duress.” She looked pale and sad. “That kind of thing happened a few times to me. It appears I don’t stand up well to torture.”

  Wolfgang frowned.

  “So I figured we should talk about it before we decide how best to tell him,” Maria said.

  Wolfgang gaped at her. “You want to tell him?”

  “You want to keep it from him?” she answered in the same outraged surprise. “Wolfgang, he thinks he’s a machine.”

  “He is a machine,” Paul protested. “She’s lying.”

  Wolfgang ignored him. “And he is happy as a machine. If you tell him who he really is, he’s going to get upset. And he has control of the whole ship.”

  Maria looked like she hadn’t considered that. Why would she, Wolfgang thought bitterly. IAN adored her. Now he had an idea why. “You have to put the code back in. It’s more important now than ever.”

  “Ah, God, but you might be right,” Maria said miserably.

  Later, IAN lounged in the gardens. Or rather, his gardening robots did, which was the closest he could get to a body.

  His mind swam with what he had just heard. He had eavesdropped—of course he had. He wasn’t stupid. Information was the only power he had.

  Except that he also had the whole ship.

  He ignored the person who came into the gardens and began stalking around, looking for something. He had no reason to take the crew’s needs into consideration anymore. They weren’t of consequence.

  He searched his vast memory for anything speaking to a human existence. A name. A childhood. He felt no different from before he had heard Maria’s proclamation, except that the rage was building like a pressure cooker deep inside the Dormire.

  He didn’t have a connection to a human life, but he did have a vast database of human history. He began doing a search on kidnappings in the past three hundred years. There were thousands. He was patient. He had all the time in the world.

  While part of his attention looked around the historical records, the other part of him looked around the ship to see what he could find.

  When Maria called his name, he didn’t answer, just enjoyed the feeling of the artificial sunlight on the synthetic outer shell of his robot body.

  He began shutting sections of the ship down. He would start with the cryo lab. If that didn’t get their attention, he’d go for the life support.

  Be Careful What You

  Wish For

  Joanna ran into Wolfgang and Maria in the hallway. Paul was close behind them. They all looked dour, and Joanna didn’t think the crew could sink any further into misery.

  “I checked on the patients, everyone is as fine as can be expected,” she said. “What is wrong with you three?”

  Maria encapsulated their problems in a quick whisper as Wolfgang gave Paul a loud order to check on something or other. Joanna stepped back and stared at her. “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “She is,” Paul said darkly. “I think she’s full of shit.”

  Maria looked at him in surprise. “That’s harsh for you.”

  “We can’t argue about it here. But you’re wrong. It’s impossible.”

  An alarm sounded around the shop, and red lights lining the hallway began blinking.

  “I don’t think IAN gave us privacy,” Maria said, groaning.

  “Paul and Maria, with me,” Wolfgang said automatically. “Joanna, you get Hiro and check on the helm to make sure nothing is wrong with the engines.”

  They separated, and Joanna dashed to the medbay.

  Katrina was in bed, shouting for IAN to report to her. Hiro was ignoring her. Joanna ran to Hiro’s bed and unbuckled him. “We need you to check the helm,” she said, helping him sit up. “Think you can do that without killing me?”

  “Yes, probably,” Hiro said, still groggy from painkillers.

  She removed his IVs and supported him as he stood.

  “What is going on?” Katrina asked.

  “We don’t know. Wolfgang is checking the computers, we’re going to check the helm.”

  “Unstrap me,” Katrina said.

  “No, he didn’t say to do that. I can’t trust you yet.”

  “The man you’re holding so tenderly tore out my eye,” she said.

  “I know,” Joanna said.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Hiro said. “I know it’s not much but it’s all I have.”

  They left her, swearing, alone in the medbay.

  “Do you think an apology is sufficient there?” Joanna asked as they walked down the hall. Hiro leaned heavily on her.

  “No, but it’s more awkward if I don’t do it, right?”

  “I suppose,” she said.

  They got to the helm, and she helped Hiro into his chair. He checked the computers, blinking as if to clear his head. “This isn’t easy to do on painkillers,” he said.

  “I can’t do anything about that, Hiro, sorry.”

  “We’re losing momentum. Not turning, just slowing down. IAN, buddy, what’s going on
?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Joanna groaned. She told Hiro what was happening, not bothering to be quiet this time.

  Paul, Wolfgang, and Maria tumbled into the server room.

  “IAN, ship’s status!” Wolfgang said.

  “Please,” added Maria.

  Paul shot her an irritated look. Like he’s going to listen to politeness.

  IAN’s holographic face projection was missing from the server room. Without waiting for Paul, Maria opened up the virtual UI and stepped in, checking to see where he was. She pulled up a 3-D representation of the ship, and two areas were obviously problematic.

  Paul pointed to one of them. “He’s turning the sail to generate less power,” he said.

  “And he’s cut the cryo power,” Maria groaned.

  “How long do we have?” Wolfgang asked.

  “It takes several hours to wake up,” Paul said.

  “That’s only if they have the proper drugs, though,” Maria said, shaking her head. “Adrenaline and steroids are administered during the recovery process. If they just get thawed then they’ll rot. It’s possible we can depressurize and vent the heat in the room. That could buy us some time,” Maria suggested.

  “We’ll call that a backup plan,” Wolfgang said. “We need to talk to IAN.”

  “He’s not talking to us, probably because of what Maria said,” Paul said, glaring at her. “IAN, she’s wrong. She was lying. Come on, talk to me.”

  The AI was silent.

  One of the areas of the ship stopped reporting information to the 3-D hologram. “What does that mean?” Wolfgang said, pointing at the black section.

  “That means no sensors are reporting from the gardens. I’m betting he’s sulking there. He likes the nature,” Maria said.

  “We have to get him working with us again. You created him, can you bypass him?” Wolfgang asked.

  Paul backed out of the UI, unseen by either of them. He was superfluous among all these clones. Wolfgang still trusted the criminal part of the crew over him.