Six Wakes

by Mur Lafferty

  “But you’re responsible for all those lives, those humans, those clone backups,” Minoru said thoughtfully. “That’s noble.”

  Minoru didn’t speak. Then after a few moments, he said, “Katrina is dead.”

  “What?” Hiro said, shocked.

  “I think Paul killed her. He’s running around in the dark, attacking whoever he can find. Wolfgang is hunting him. If you could see in infrared, you’d be very interested in what’s going on in there.”

  “Is Maria okay?” he asked, his concern overriding his distrust.

  “She’s fine. She’s hiding in a tree. She already knows what Paul can do; she’s not stupid. Weak and cowardly, but not stupid.”

  “Minoru,” Hiro said. “Turn the lights back on, please.”

  “I don’t think so,” Minoru said, his voice sad. “I think you may be right. It’s not worth it to keep you all alive.”

  Dying on a ghost ship felt noble and romantic. Dying from an attack by the boil on the neck of the crew was pathetic. Hiro scrambled. “Do you want Mignon to win? Or do you want a chance to someday get back at her?”

  “Revenge. That is an interesting reason to keep living,” Minoru said.

  He lapsed into silence again. “Minoru. Minoru!” Hiro said. He swore. He began limping forward, feeling the blood run from his wound. He was getting cold. The stitches in his hip had popped and blood trickled down his leg. He only barely realized the lights were returning, as an artificial sunrise began. He saw some figures by the pond, but tripped and fell again.

  He didn’t get back up.

  The Value of a Life

  When the lights went out, Wolfgang felt a stinging in his side. Paul had cut him, with what? Wolfgang let go of the man’s wrist in shock, swearing and stumbling to the side.

  Why didn’t I see if he had any more weapons? The blood ran hot over his hand; it was a slim, deep laceration.

  He flailed around in the dark, hearing footsteps and other people cry out. He recognized Joanna. Katrina made a strangled, surprised sound. Wolfgang ran forward two steps and tripped over the bottle of whiskey. He landed hard, his side throbbing. The blood was slick and copious. He had no idea how much he was bleeding but he guessed it wasn’t a little bit.

  “IAN, lights now!” he called, impotently.

  His hands fell on an arm, he followed it to find a woman’s shoulders and hair. The hair was sodden, and he felt toward her neck to find it slit. The hair was straight, though, not Joanna’s curly hair. He felt the bandages on the face. Katrina, then. The blood from her neck was flowing at a trickle; she was nearly dead.

  Joanna screamed again, an angry sound, and he heard struggles. A few thumps that sounded like punches. Paul cried out in pain, and then Joanna’s voice stopped.

  Wolfgang stumbled toward the sounds and caught a boot in the face. He didn’t know whose, but he grabbed it and tugged.

  The leg was flesh, not prosthetic. The body came with it. Wolfgang climbed on top of Paul and closed his hands around his neck. Paul lashed up with the cleaver, slashing Wolfgang’s arms, unable to reach his face.

  Paul stopped struggling suddenly, and Wolfgang’s hands and face were suddenly very wet. He blinked, realizing he could see, barely. Paul was under his hands, unmoving, his throat slit.

  Joanna sat to the side as the light increased, a bloody knife in her hand. Her jumpsuit was worryingly wet, and she smiled at him weakly.

  “Thanks for the rescue,” she said. “What was that you said about sacrifice?”

  “The greatest gift one creature can give another is that of sacrifice. Clones can’t sacrifice,” he said, crawling off Paul’s body to go to her. He took her hand.

  “Right,” she said. “Our deaths mean nothing because the next day we can wake up and do it all over again.”

  He remembered these words and suddenly he wanted life to matter again, for death to mean something.

  He wanted to tell Joanna something, but her eyes were closed. She gripped his hand once, and then relaxed.

  “No,” he said. “Not you. Don’t go.”

  His vision swayed and he realized he was very cold. He leaned against her, knowing it wouldn’t be too long for him either.

  He could use a rest.

  Maria carried guilt on her shoulders.

  She also carried Hiro on her shoulders.

  Everyone else was dead. She would take care of them soon.

  Minoru had unlocked the door on her request when he had let the sun rise again. She carefully climbed the ladder with Hiro over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry toward the higher deck where the gravity was easier to deal with.

  Hiro was bleeding from a deep cut and his bullet holes. Her own wounds had opened with exertion and her bandages were soaked through with blood.

  He was bleeding badly, but he wouldn’t die. She wouldn’t let him.

  “Come on, we can make it. We’ll get you to medbay and the doctor will stitch you up until you’re irritating the hell out of all of us again,” she said.

  She was hoping the playful barb would get him moving, but he didn’t respond. She didn’t know if he knew the doctor was dead or not, but hope might help keep him going.

  She was grateful that he was a small man, and that the gravity was lighter with each step up the ladder.

  Hiro’s blood ran down his side to soak her neck where she carried him, and she wondered how much he had lost.

  That asshole Paul. No. It went deeper. Sallie had caused all of this. Sallie and her twisted desire for revenge and reach for power.

  Poor Hiro. Poor Hiro with his fractured personality. That she had caused. She and Sallie.

  Maria muttered to herself, part apology, part chant to keep herself going. One more step. Now another one. Now another.

  They reached the hallway of the clones’ quarters. The entire floor was quiet. Minoru hadn’t said anything since she had left the gardens. She looked behind them, wincing at the trail of blood they had left. When this was all over, someone would have a mess to clean up.

  No, wait. She would have a mess.

  “Who were you talking to?” Hiro asked sleepily.

  “No one. Myself. Nothing important. Don’t worry about it, just try to hold on.” She adjusted her grip on him. “Can you walk?”

  “I don’t think I can do much of anything,” he said. “Listen, just let me die. Then you can clone me again. It’ll be okay. I have faith in you.”

  She shook him gently. “Hey, no, don’t leave me. I can’t clone you again, remember? Paul fucked with all the machines. We don’t have any new bodies. This is the last one, you better take care of it.”

  “A clone without a body. A rebel without a cause. A horse with no name,” he said in a singsong voice. “You’re nice.”

  “You talk all you like, Hiro. Just remember to hold on, all right?” she said.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled into her ear. “This must be hard. Want me to carry you for a minute?”

  She choked out a laugh. “That would be nice, but you’re the one here who paid for the pony ride, and you’re getting your full money’s worth.”

  “Wanted a pony with white spots,” Hiro complained. “You’re just one uniform color.”

  “We must all live with disappointment. This is the pony you have, so it’s the pony you will ride. Let’s go.”

  “Giddyap,” he whispered, sounding far away.

  She slapped his leg. “Hey. Come back. We each have our different jobs here. I can’t do mine if you won’t do yours.”

  “Sorry,” he said. He began to hum a tuneless song.

  She began to list what she needed to do. Get Hiro’s DNA matrix from the medbay. Figure out a way to mindmap him. Then fix him. How to fix him, though?

  She thought of Mrs. Perkins, the keeper of her secrets, rocking away in her library. The hacked mindmaps nested inside her, locked away for posterity, like vials of smallpox. The clue to fix Hiro was actually inside her.

  “You had the power all the time, Dorot
hy,” Maria said to herself, imagining red shoes clicking together.

  “You’re Maria,” Hiro said.

  “And you’re Hiro,” she said, realization giving her new energy. “And you’re going to be okay.”

  Wake Six: Minoru Takahashi

  Deus Ex Bebe

  Maria deposited Hiro facedown on a medbay bed. There were no clean ones, so she had to put him back in the bed he’d been confined to. She removed his jumpsuit, cleaned him, and sutured the wounds closed. He’d bled a lot. She set the medical printer to synthesize more blood for him.

  She realized with despair that she couldn’t use the doctor’s smart syringes, so she hooked Hiro back up to the painkiller drip—half gone—he had been on before.

  “I wish you hadn’t drunk so much,” she said. “For that matter, I shouldn’t have either.”

  Hiro spoke up suddenly, startling her. “I spent a lot of time in jail for the yadokari crimes, and then more time with psychiatrists, trying to keep them subdued. Hypnotic suggestion worked, but only until I woke up again in a new body.”

  Maria held her breath, worried any sound would break him from his conversational trance. He didn’t open his eyes. “The one thing I found that silenced them, the other voices, is drinking. A doctor told me that in a bar. She told me that as my drinking buddy, not as my doctor, because she said it wasn’t right for her to suggest a patient drink more. But she suggested I try it. It worked. I was suicidal at the time, the only way I thought to kill them would be to kill myself. But then I discovered that a strong sake fully put down something inside me that hours of psychology and psychiatry couldn’t.

  “So what I mean is, I can hold my drink,” he concluded. He reached out, not opening his eyes. She took his hand. “We are all pawns, Maria.”

  She managed a smile, but it slid away quickly. “Yeah, we all got played. Big-time.”

  Hiro didn’t answer. He breathed long and deep, finally asleep.

  Maria collapsed into a chair and wept.

  Bebe. Bebe printing out a fat, juicy pig. Bebe printing out a piping hot cup of coffee, just the way Maria liked it.

  Maria’s eyes snapped open. Why was she dreaming about Bebe?

  “Now I know I’m either dying or becoming more sane, dreaming about a machine making a pig from synthetic proteins and high-quality flavorings that it takes—”

  She pushed herself up hard out of her chair, cursing to herself for not thinking of this earlier.

  “—it takes the data from basic mindmaps of the crew,” Maria finished. “Shit. Bebe can read our mindmaps!” She rushed to the door.

  And Bebe was big enough to cook a pig.

  “Holy. Shit.”

  Maria stood in the server room staring at Minoru’s facial hologram. “Open up. I’m going to find your lost data.”

  His eyes widened in surprise, but he let her in. She went past his databases, and his programming, and his personality, into the corner where she usually put commented code.

  And there it all was. His memory of himself, his childhood in the Nippon islands. His schooling, his mischief. She found where everything belonged and spent the night putting him back together.

  She got Hiro’s tablet and pulled up the printer instructions. Now that she knew what to look for, she found it—a packet within the instructions held a highly compressed file.

  “Christ, Minoru, you really are a genius,” she whispered. “But this is going to take me some time.”

  Day Five

  She worked non-stop all the next day, first on the data that Minoru had hidden from everyone including himself, and then on modifying Bebe by cannibalizing some of the doctor’s tech.

  She checked on Hiro from time to time. He was sober now, and not inclined to look directly at her. She couldn’t blame him. She left food and water for him silently, and got back to work.

  She fell asleep on the kitchen table at last, as Bebe began printing an altogether new protein-based form.

  Hiro found her in the kitchen, dead asleep. He was hurting and needed more painkillers. He didn’t want to talk to her, but she was all he had. Minoru wasn’t answering his queries, but it was clear that he wasn’t trying to kill them with a lack of life support anymore.

  He leaned on his crutch and saw that the food printer was busy.

  “Maria,” he said, his eyes growing wide. “You didn’t. Wolfgang’s going to be so pissed at you.”

  Maria sat up with a gasp, looking around fearfully. She blinked several times, and then focused on him. “Oh. Right. How’s it coming?”

  Bebe was creating something gruesome, organs and innards, and she peered through his door with interest.

  “You think Wolfgang’s going to be mad?” she asked.

  “He’s Wolfgang. He’s mad at everything. But who is that?”

  It was her moment, her redemption, possibly.

  She watched the program on the doctor’s scanner, which she had rolled into the kitchen to hook to Bebe via cables, running hacked software through the food printer.

  “Minoru Takahashi. I found a copy of his DNA matrix. It was in the printer instructions. He put it there for you to find.”

  “That unbelievable asshole,” Hiro said, shaking his head. “Too smart for his own good. Do you think this is going to work?”

  “He offered to be first. If it doesn’t work, he goes back into the computer and then I try again before we print the rest of the crew.”

  “How are we going to print the rest of the crew? We don’t have mindmaps or anything.”

  She patted Bebe. “This thing is so complex it can pull entire mindmaps from the spittle it takes from us. Including personality. That’s how it figures out what food you want exactly at that moment. I was able to extract a mindmap from that and cross-reference it with the backups I had on file. They’re identical, only with our more recent memories. Mix that with the DNA matrix I was able to get from the doc’s scanner, and this might actually work.” She grimaced. “We also have a great deal of DNA just sitting in the gardens right now, if we need it.”

  “That’s amazing,” he said, shaking his head. “Wait—if Minoru isn’t flying the ship, then who—”

  Maria didn’t look at him. “I am. I took my own map and stripped out what I had to, then made it fly the ship.”

  “Shit, you should have made Paul do it.”

  “As much as I agree with you, I’m not making those calls. We’ll wake him up. Try him. Judge him as a crew. Then and only then will I do that to him. And even that feels wrong.” She looked at the ceiling, dark circles under her eyes. “I told you I don’t find this easy.”

  She stretched, wincing. Bloody spots bloomed from her bandages, which she hadn’t changed. “Besides. We can’t trust him unless we very carefully go over his mindmap.”

  “You realize we’re going to have to go get the other printer for food. No one is going to want to eat out of this one ever again,” Hiro said. “Well, I’m not going to want to. I don’t know about the rest of them.”

  They sat in silence and watched the food printer slowly knit together a fresh human clone.

  It took five hours, but Bebe was finally putting the last details into Takahashi’s hair, something Maria felt could have been skipped. Bebe was very thorough.

  It dinged.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Hiro said, and Maria gave him a tired smile.

  She held her breath. What if she was wrong? What if she just created a meal that looked like Takahashi?

  He stirred. Opened dark-brown eyes and blinked. Looked around, and started in surprise.

  Maria wrenched the door open and slid out the pad they had put in there for the printer to create his body on. “Minoru, it’s okay. You’re okay.”

  He looked around, eyes wide and frightened.

  “Maria. You’re Maria,” he said. He felt his hands and face, shaking slightly. “You did it.”

  “You’re the one who left all the data for me,” Maria said. “I just put it all together, after I
found it, of course. You’re going to have to tell me how you managed to compromise the food printer’s manual.”

  Minoru’s eyes locked on Hiro’s, and he climbed awkwardly to his feet and laughed. He said something in Japanese, and Hiro answered. Minoru hugged Hiro tightly, and Hiro groaned in pain.

  “Careful. Hiro doesn’t have a shiny new body like you do,” Maria said, handing Minoru a jumpsuit.

  The men continued to speak in Japanese as Minoru dressed, and Maria felt left out. She cleared her throat and they stopped talking.

  “Now that you two are awake, I’m going to get some rest in the brig. Wake up the rest of the crew—Minoru knows what to do. When everyone wakes up, let me know.”

  She left them without waiting for their answer, and trudged to her prison room. She knew Wolfgang would put her there eventually anyway.

  She’d never been so tired.

  She estimated it would take fifteen hours, minimum, to make the rest of the crew, minus the murderer.

  It was a full twenty-four hours before Hiro came to get her.

  He looked much improved, with freshly dressed wounds and a clean jumpsuit. He smiled at her and entered the room.

  He sat down on her cot and looked up at her silently.

  “What?” she finally asked, exasperated. “Are they back? Are they okay? Did the saliva work?”

  “Joanna says if we were on the Earth, you’d get a Nobel Prize for this. Wolfgang wants to let you rot in here, but he’s mellowing.” He cocked his head. “Why didn’t you hack him to remove the fact that he’s going to hate you for everything you’ve done?”

  Maria gaped at him. “Are you kidding me? I’m not going to alter his mind for my convenience. That’s who he is. If he hates me, I’ve got to work harder than commenting out some code to make it up to him.”

  He smiled at her for real. “I think that’s the first big step to doing so. While he’s pissed as hell, he’s impressed that you allowed him to be pissed as hell. This has in turn confused him. He’s sleeping.”