by mikel evins
He just stared, looking worried.
“I sedated you,” I said. “Your body is now in a creche.”
“I died?” he said calmly.
“No. Our creches are considerably more capable than yours. The creche you’re in is preventing the virus from developing further while we study the problem of removing it from your body.”
“Removing it? Removing a virus?”
“Yes. Probably the best way to think of it is that we’ll reconstruct you, leaving out the virus.”
“You can do that?”
“Probably. It depends on how much damage the virus has already done, and whether our earlier scans were good enough to help us repair it. Oleh, did you carry creches aboard Angel of Cygnus?”
He nodded.
“In the medical center. We all had regular archive scans every few months, and extra ones if we were assigned to high-risk duties. When things were getting bad we were getting scanned every few days.”
He winced at the memory.
“So there should be archive records for you aboard Angel?”
He nodded again.
“Should be.”
“Good. If possible, I’d like to get any information you might have about how to find the records and the creches.”
“The medical center’s the place to look,” he said. “I can draw you a map.”
“If you would imagine in detail how to get there step-by-step, that will be enough,” I said. “We’re running you on one of our processors. We can take the map from processor memory.”
“Why do you need the creche records?”
I said, “If we have your archive records we can be more confident about removing the virus from you. Also, it seems like it might be a good idea to retrieve the records for the other people aboard Angel, in case they want to be reconstructed.”
He frowned at me.
“What do mean, ‘in case they want to be reconstructed?’”
“If we have their records then we can ask them.”
He frowned.
“How are you going to ask them unless you go ahaed and reconstruct them?”
“The same way I’m talking to you now.”
He blinked at me.
“Oh,” he said. “So you’ll ask them if they want to be reconstructed?”
“Yes.”
“And if they do, then, what? You’ll just go ahead and do it?”
“Why not?”
“Isn’t it expensive?”
I shrugged.
“Not unreasonably. They will incur a debt. We’ll explain that before we do anything. Anyone from Angel of Cygnus will undoubtedly be able to pay their debt many times over from the proceeds of talking to information services about their history and experiences.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “You aren’t the first people from centuries past to have wound up alive again. I did a little research about it.”
“Hunh,” he said. After a moment, his gaze wandered to the window again.
I waited. He stared. After a while he looked at me and said, “Can you do anything for Angel of Cygnus?”
“For your ship?”
“Yes. She’s as hurt lonely as I was, and now I’ve left her. What happened aboard her…it wasn’t her fault.”
I wanted to ask more about what had happened aboard her, but that wasn’t what I had come to do.
“I don’t know what we can do for her,” I said. “The more we can learn about what happened, the more options we’ll have.”
He nodded, lips pursed, looking away again.
After a while he turned and spoke to me again.
“So I’m not actually me?” he said. “I’m a fake?”
“You’re a high-fidelity simulation of Oleh Itzal’s mind, with access to whatever memories our equipment can reach. There may be gaps in your memory. If so, don’t worry. We’ll work around them.”
“Gaps? Because of the virus?”
“Maybe, though it looks like it isn’t in the main memory-related parts of your brain, not yet. There can be gaps in a completely healthy brain, for a lot of different reasons.”
He stared out the window again. I glanced out and noticed that the children—if that’s what they had been—were gone.
“I should be scared to death, shouldn’t I?” he said.
“I think you probably are.”
“I don’t feel it,” he said.
“No,” I said.
He looked at me again.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“We’re going to remove the virus. When we do, we’re going to control the process by which the Fabric implants its processing nodes, called nanosomes, in your tissues. They will make the full services of the Fabric, available to you.”
“That sounds like it should be frightening,” he said. “It sounds like reconstruction.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure I want that. How do I know the reconstructed person will be me?”
“Let me be clear,” I said. “Because you are a medical simulation, and not actually the original Oleh Itzal, your wishes have no legal force. I intend to discuss options with you, and try to understand what Oleh Itzal would want me to do, but the final decision isn’t yours to make, because you’re not Oleh Itzal.”
“You should ask the real me what I want,” he said. “What you’re talking about—it should frighten me. I don’t feel it, but I know it should frighten me.”
“We should ask permission,” I said. “But we can’t. You’re unconscious because your metabolism is suspended. That’s so that we can keep the virus from doing further damage. Even if I allowed you to awaken and risk serious further damage, we would not be able to discuss options with you. Your body would be in the grip of intense seizures. You would be delirious and hallucinating. We had to physically restrain and sedate you to prevent you attacking us. Talking this over with you is simply not an option.”
“So you’re just going to decide what to do, without asking me.”
“No. I’m going to talk it over with you, with your simulated personality, because I think you can help me understand what Oleh Itzal would want.”
“What if I—what if Oleh Itzal wants to die?”
“A reconstructed Oleh Itzal will have the opportunity to make that decision.”
I leaned forward, trying to catch his eye. He looked at me.
“Oleh, every person has to decide for eirself what reconstruction means. Whether the person who comes out of the creche is the same person who went in.”
He looked away again.
He said, “I guess I always thought that if I came out of a creche, it would be because I had already died. Questions like this wouldn’t really matter, would they? The old me would already be dead, anyway.”
“In a way, that’s the situation you’re in now,” I said. “If we hadn’t put you in the creche, you would have died within a few days. If we took you out of the creche, you would die in a few days. And if we just left you in the creche, you would never wake up. In short, if you don’t accept reconstruction, you’re as good as dead.”
He sighed and continued looking out the window.
“Oleh,” I said. “How do you know that you’re the same person from one day to the next?”
He looked at me sharply.
“What?”
“When you get out of bed in the morning, how do you know you’re the same person who got in?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“Think about it,” I said. “You go to bed. You fall asleep. Your consciousness stops. Hours later, it comes back. What if going to sleep is death? What if you cease to exist when you lose consciousness?”
“But I don’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I wake up the next morning!”
“Do you? Or does your brain assemble an entirely new person from the memories lying around in it? How do you know you’re actually the same person?”
> He shook his head.
“That’s a ridiculous question.”
“Is it? How is it different from losing consciousness in the creche, then waking up in the creche?”
He stared out the window, frowning. After a while, I heard the small people shouting and laughing again outside.
“Think it over,” I said.
He didn’t respond. He continued staring out the window.
15.
A little after midnight by Kestrel’s clock, she sounded her klaxon and displayed her red lights again. I was in the infirmary with a crewman who had just learned a hard lesson about keeping track of one’s tools in zero G when Kestrel said, “We are under attack.”
A few seconds later, Esgar Rayleigh’s voice came on the local Fabric channel saying, “All shifts to emergency stations. This is not a drill.”
I was already at my station. I wanted to jet down the companionway to the lift and head for the ship’s bridge to see what was happening, but I didn’t. I stayed in the infirmary, encouraged my patient out the hatch and back to her own station, and, a little guiltily, found the channel that Kestrel used to share her sensor feeds.
At first glance, the view outside Kestrel was unchanged. She still hung motionless above Angel’s habitat rings. The drives on both ships were still silent. Angel was still dark. The Milky Way was still eternal.
Then I felt it: the prickling and itching on Kestrel’s skin. She scratched the itch with voltage and I saw the evanescent flashes of arcs as a hundred tiny somethings were burned to vapor.
I looked closer. More of the tiny somethings were falling like rain from the direction of Angel toward Kestrel’s hull. They weren’t projectiles in the conventional sense; they were moving too slowly. They were boarders of some kind, tiny arbeiters, perhaps. They lighted on Kestrel’s skin and began to crawl about, looking for something—most likely a way in. They stuck to Kestrel and probed at her with tiny feelers that tickled.
There were thousands of them. They pattered against Kestrel’s hull and against the gasherd on the quarantine bay. The gasherd pushed them out, making itself supremely slippery. They floundered and slid to its edges, where they swarmed.
I looked still closer. They were identical: six-legged lozenges of polymer with whiskers of metal in them. They carried droplets of water with organic compounds dissolved and emulsified in them.
“They’re spores,” I said on the common channel. “Most likely carrying engineered viruses and maybe malware. Don’t let them make contact with anything.”
Kestrel said, “Understood. I don’t think we’re in danger. They are not stressing my defenses.”
She used her manipulators to lift the bots away from her skin, then she fried them with rippling arcs of voltage.
They came in waves. Kestrel would catch a wave of them in her magnetic manipulators and send electrical discharges through them, frying them to crusts, then another wave would descend. The rain continued for the better part of two hours, then stopped.
The Captain called the departments to his mess.
“The Cold Ones left this imagery in my buffers,” said Kestrel, opening a display volume.
We saw clouds of bots like smoke issuing from vents on Angel’s spine. One cloud emerged and spread out, falling toward Kestrel. After a minute or so another cloud emerged, and then another. By zooming on them we could see that they weren’t all identical, after all. There were at least half a dozen slightly different models. Near the vents were rows of thousands of small pods, a little smaller than a fist.
“What are those things?” Jaemon said, pointing at one of the pods. “Are those the munitions we saw before?”
“Yes,” said Kestrel. “Self-guided bombs.”
“Bombs,” said Jaemon, shaking his head.
“On a generation ship?” said Chief Engineer Burrell. “Are you sure?”
Kestrel spooled her structural and chemical analysis to us over the Fabric.
Burrell said, “Okay, they’re bombs. What the hell?”
“Self-propelled, self-guiding bombs,” said Yaug.
The Captain shook his head.
“We knew about them before. I guess I forgot about them because they don’t make any goddamned sense.”
“Well, what do we know?” I said. I began to tick off points on my fingers.
“Angel of Cygnus is a starship. She was launched some time after the end of the Mech Wars, about four thousand years ago. Her mission was to visit several stars, one after another, but she returned early, after visiting only one of them. Her crew is missing, presumed dead, except for one survivor. The ship’s mind shows signs of traumatic stress. She forgot she had met us just a few minutes after talking to us. Her habitats are not just deserted, they’re dead and decaying. There are arbeiters running around them with corpses strapped to them—apparently Angel of Cygnus is pretending to be those people for some reason that we don’t understand. We’ve detected her fabs running heavy production of something, we don’t know what. She just sprayed us with thousands of millimeter-scale bots, probably bearing biological weapons, and we just found hundreds, perhaps thousands, of self-guiding munitions attached to her spine.”
I looked around the table.
“Now,” I said, “What does that tell us?”
The table was quiet.
After a few tense moments Jaemon said, “Damned if I know.”
“Yeah,” said the Captain, scratching the back of his head. “Me too. Anybody got any ideas?”
16.
“Kestrel has more crazy news,” said the Captain. We were meeting around his table again. He was looking harried. In fact, all the biologicals aboard Kestrel were looking more than usually tired and irritable.
Sleep is one of the strangest things that biologicals do. It was the concept that I had the most trouble with when I was in training. Every inherited biological design of any complexity requires the organism to shut down and become helpless for something like a third of its life. It’s completely crazy.
Crazier still, biologicals are insistent in their praise of this design defect. They’re effusive about its restorative qualities, about how good it feels to lie down after a tough day, and how refreshing to wake up afterward.
If you ask me, they’re making a virtue of necessity. Wouldn’t you be better off if you didn’t need the rest? Wouldn’t it be better if you felt great all the time, and not just after a night’s sleep? But there’s no talking to them about it.
It’s perfectly possible for biologicals to augment their nervous systems so that they don’t need sleep, but not many do it.
Eventually I stopped thinking about it. Some things are beyond understanding.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I think I should mention that our biological members seem to be in need of more sleep than they’re getting.”
The Captain looked at me for a good five seconds.
“Thanks, Lev,” he said at last. “Could you mention that to Angel of Cygnus when you get the chance?”
“I’m just—”
“—doing your job, I know,” said the Captain. He sighed and pressed a palm against his forehead. “Sorry. You’re right, I’m getting tired, and it’s making me irritable.”
He raised the squeeze bulb in his right hand.
“Fortunately, there’s coffee.”
He took a sip from the bulb and sprayed most of it onto his tunic.
“Unfortunately,” he said. “It seems I haven’t mastered the art of using a squeeze bulb without burning my tongue.”
Kestrel said, “I’ll send someone with a towel.”
“Don’t bother,” said the Captain.“I think my command authority will survive a few minutes with a stained tunic. Now, why don’t you tell the rest of these fine people your crazy news?”
Kestrel said, “There is a second survivor aboard Angel of Cygnus.”
“What?” said Burrell. “How did you miss that?”
“I didn’t.” Kestrel sounded mildly offende
d.
“What are you saying, that this person wasn’t there before, and now e is?”
“She,” said the Captain. “We’ve identified her as Seher Altan, a manager in the life-support maintenance department. And yeah, it looks like she wasn’t there and now she is.”
“Captain—” Burrell scowled menacingly.
“I’m aware of how nonsensical that sounds, but Kestrel and I have had this conversation, and we’ve been over the scans together. For that matter, you’re welcome to go over them yourself, if you like.”
“So this is legit?” Jaemon said. “There’s really another survivor? One who wasn’t there before?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
We all stared at each other for a minute or so.
Finally, Jaemon said, “When is this ship going to start making sense?”
“When we figure out what it all means,” said Yaug. He offered us a wry half-smile.
“Any luck with that, Doc?” said the Captain.
Yaug shook his head.
“Sorry. Not so far.”
“So what are we going to do about it?” Burrell said. She was still frowning, and her tone was acid.
