by Ken MacLeod
Another cough sounded from the last row of vats, then a soft voice. “Something rather violent, I’d say.”
“Welcome back, Doctor, you all right?” Maria asked, pulling herself toward the woman.
The new clone of Joanna nodded, her tight curls glistening with the synth-amneo. Her upper body was thin and strong, like all new clones, but her legs were small and twisted. She glanced up at the bodies and pursed her lips. “What happened?” She didn’t wait for them to answer, but grasped a handhold and pulled herself toward the ceiling where a body floated.
“Check on Paul,” Maria said to Hiro, and followed Joanna.
The doctor turned her own corpse to where she could see it, and her eyes grew wide. She swore quietly. Maria came up behind her and swore much louder.
Her throat had a stab wound, with great waving gouts of blood reaching from her neck. If the doctor’s advanced age was any indication, they were well past the beginning of the mission. Maria remembered her as a woman who looked to be in her thirties, with smooth dark skin and black hair. Now wrinkles lined the skin around her eyes and the corners of her mouth, and gray shot through her tightly braided hair. Maria looked at the other bodies; from her vantage point she could now see each also showed their age.
“I didn’t even notice,” she said, breathless. “I-I only noticed the blood and gore. We’ve been on this ship for decades. Do you remember anything?”
“No.” Joanna’s voice was flat and grim. “We need to tell the captain.”
“No one touch anything! This whole room is a crime scene!” Wolfgang shouted up to them. “Get away from that body!”
“Wolfgang, the crime scene, if this is a crime scene, is already contaminated by about twenty-five hundred gallons of synth-amneo,” Hiro said from outside Paul’s vat. “With blood spattering everywhere.”
“What do you mean if it’s a crime scene?” Maria asked. “Do you think that the grav drive died and stopped the ship from spinning and then knives just floated into us?”
Speaking of the knife, it drifted near the ceiling. Maria propelled herself toward it and snatched it before it got pulled against the air intake filter, which was already getting clogged with bodily fluids she didn’t even want to think about.
The doctor did as Wolfgang had commanded, moving away from her old body to join him and the captain. “This is murder,” she said. “But Hiro’s right, Wolfgang, there is a reason zero-g forensics never took off as a science. The air filters are sucking up the evidence as we speak. By now everyone is covered in everyone else’s blood. And now we have six new people and vats of synth-amneo floating around the bay messing up whatever’s left.”
Wolfgang set his jaw and glared at her. His tall, thin frame shone with the bluish amneo fluid. He opened his mouth to counter the doctor, but Hiro interrupted them.
“Five,” interrupted Hiro. He coughed and expelled more synth-amneo, which Maria narrowly dodged. He grimaced in apology. “Five new people. Paul’s still inside.” He pointed to their engineer, who remained in his vat, eyes closed.
Maria remembered seeing his eyes open when she was in her own vat. But now Paul floated, eyes closed, hands covering his genitals, looking like a child who was playing hide-and-seek and whoever was “It” was going to devour him. He too was pale, naturally stocky, lightly muscled instead of the heavier man Maria remembered.
“Get him out of there,” Katrina said. Wolfgang obliged, going to another terminal and pressing the button to open the vat.
Hiro reached in and grabbed Paul by the wrist and pulled him and his fluid cage free.
“Okay, only five of us were out,” Maria said, floating down. “That cuts the synth-amneo down by around four hundred gallons. Not a huge improvement. There’s still a lot of crap flying around. You’re not likely to get evidence from anything except the bodies themselves.” She held the knife out to Wolfgang, gripping the edge of the handle with her thumb and forefinger. “And possibly the murder weapon.”
He looked around, and Maria realized he was searching for something with which to take the knife. “I’ve already contaminated it with my hands, Wolfgang. It’s been floating among blood and dead bodies. The only thing we’ll get out of it is that it probably killed us all.”
“We need to get IAN back online,” Katrina said. “Get the grav drive back on. Find the other two bodies. Check on the cargo. Then we will fully know our situation.”
Hiro whacked Paul smartly on the back, and the man doubled over and retched, sobbing. Wolfgang watched with disdain as Paul bounced off the wall with no obvious awareness of his surroundings.
“Once we get IAN back online, we’ll have him secure a channel to Earth,” Katrina said.
“My speech functions are inaccessible,” the computer repeated. The captain gritted her teeth.
“That’s going to be tough, Captain,” Joanna said. “These bodies show considerable age, indicating we’ve been in space for much longer than our mindmaps are telling us.”
Katrina rubbed her forehead, closing her eyes. She was silent, then opened her eyes and began typing things into the terminal. “Get Paul moving, we need him.”
Hiro stared helplessly as Paul continued to sob, curled into a little drifting ball, still trying to hide his privates.
A ball of vomit—not the synth-amneo expelled from the bodies, but actual stomach contents—floated toward the air intake vent and was sucked into the filter. Maria knew that after they took care of all of the captain’s priorities, she would still be stuck with the job of changing the air filters, and probably crawling through the ship’s vents to clean all of the bodily fluids out before they started to become a biohazard. Suddenly a maintenance-slash-junior-engineer position on an important starship didn’t seem so glamorous.
“I think Paul will feel better with some clothes,” Joanna said, looking at him with pity.
“Yeah, clothes sound good,” Hiro said. They were all naked, their skin rising in goose bumps. “Possibly a shower while we’re at it.”
“I will need my crutches or a chair,” Joanna said. “Unless we want to keep the grav drive off.”
“Stop it,” Katrina said. “The murderer could still be on the ship and you’re talking about clothes and showers?”
Wolfgang waved a hand to dismiss her concern. “No, clearly the murderer died in the fight. We are the only six aboard the ship.”
“You can’t know that,” de la Cruz said. “What’s happened in the past several decades? We need to be cautious. No one goes anywhere alone. Everyone in twos. Maria, you and Hiro get the doctor’s crutches from the medbay. She’ll want them when the grav drive gets turned back on.”
“I can just take the prosthetics off that body,” Joanna said, pointing upward. “It won’t need them anymore.”
“That’s evidence,” Wolfgang said, steadying his own floating corpse to study the stab wounds. He fixated on the bubbles of gore still attached to his chest. “Captain?”
“Fine, get jumpsuits, get the doctor a chair or something, and check on the grav drive,” Katrina said. “The rest of us will work. Wolfgang, you and I will get the bodies tethered together. We don’t want them to sustain more damage when the grav drive comes back online.”
On the way out, Maria paused to check on her own body, which she hadn’t really examined before. It seemed too gruesome to look into your own dead face. The body was strapped to a seat at one of the terminals, drifting gently against the tether. A large bubble of blood drifted from the back of her neck, where she had clearly been stabbed. Her lips were white and her skin was a sickly shade of green. She now knew where the floating vomit had come from.
“It looks like I was the one who hit the resurrection switch,” she said to Hiro, pointing to her body.
“Good thing too,” Hiro said. He looked at the captain, conversing closely with Wolfgang. “I wouldn’t expect a medal anytime soon, though. She’s not looking like she’s in the mood.”
The resurrection switch was a fai
l-safe button. If all of the clones on the ship died at once, a statistical improbability, then the AI should have been able to wake up the next clones. If the ship failed to do so, an even higher statistical improbability, then a physical switch in the cloning bay could carry out the job, provided there was someone alive enough to push it.
Like the others, Maria’s body showed age. Her middle had softened and her hands floating above the terminal were thin and spotted. She had been the physical age of thirty-nine when they had boarded.
“I gave you an order,” Katrina said. “And Dr. Glass, it looks like talking our engineer down will fall to you. Do it quickly, or else he’s going to need another new body when I’m through with him.”
Hiro and Maria got moving before the captain could detail what she was going to do to them. Although, Maria reflected, it would be hard to top what they had just apparently been through.
Maria remembered the ship as shinier and brighter: metallic and smooth, with handholds along the wall for low-gravity situations and thin metal grates making up the floor, revealing a subfloor of storage compartments and vents. Now it was duller, another indication that decades of spaceflight had changed the ship as it had changed the crew. It was darker, a few lights missing, illuminated by the yellow lights of an alert. Someone—probably the captain—had commanded an alert.
Some of the previous times, Maria had died in a controlled environment. She had been in bed after illness, age, or, once, injury. The helpful techs had created a final mindmap of her brain, and she had been euthanized after signing a form permitting it. A doctor had approved it, the body was disposed of neatly, and she had woken up young, pain-free, with all her memories of all her lives thus far.
Some other times hadn’t been as gentle, but still were a better experience than this.
Having her body still hanging around, blood and vomit everywhere, offended her on a level she hadn’t thought possible. Once you were gone, the body meant nothing, had no sentimental value. The future body was all that mattered. The past shouldn’t be there, staring you in the face with dead eyes. She shuddered.
“When the engines get running again, it’ll warm up,” Hiro said helpfully, mistaking the reason for her shiver.
They reached a junction, and she led the way left. “Decades, Hiro. We’ve been out here for decades. What happened to our mindmaps?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.
“We had the cocktail party in Luna station as the final passengers were entering cryo and getting loaded. We came aboard. We were given some hours to move into our quarters. Then we had the tour, which ended in the cloning bay, getting our updated mindmaps.”
“Same here,” he said.
“Are you scared?” Maria said, stopping and looking at him.
She hadn’t scrutinized him since waking up in the cloning bay. She was used to the way that clones with the experience of hundreds of years could look like they had just stepped out of university. Their bodies woke up at peak age, twenty years old, designed to be built with muscle. What the clones did with that muscle once they woke up was their challenge.
Akihiro Sato was a thin Pan Pacific United man of Japanese descent with short black hair that was drying in stiff cowlicks. He had lean muscles, and high cheekbones. His eyes were black, and they met hers with a level gaze. She didn’t look too closely at the rest of him; she wasn’t rude.
He pulled at a cowlick, then tried to smooth it down. “I’ve woken up in worse places.”
“Like where?” she asked, pointing down the hall from where they had come. “What’s worse than that horror movie scene?”
He raised his hands in supplication. “I don’t mean literally. I mean I’ve lost time before. You have to learn to adapt sometimes. Fast. I wake up. I assess the immediate threat. I try to figure out where I was last time I uploaded a mindmap. This time I woke up in the middle of a bunch of dead bodies, but there was no threat that I could tell.” He cocked his head, curious. “Haven’t you ever lost time before? Not even a week? Surely you’ve died between backups.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “But I’ve never woken up in danger, or in the wake of danger.”
“You’re still not in danger,” he said. “That we know of.”
She stared at him.
“Immediate danger,” he amended. “I’m not going to stab you right here in the hall. All of our danger right now consists of problems that we can likely fix. Lost memories, broken computer, finding a murderer. Just a little work and we’ll be back on track.”
“You are the strangest kind of optimist,” she said. “All the same, I’d like to continue to freak out if you don’t mind.”
“Try to keep it together. You don’t want to devolve into whatever Paul has become,” he suggested as he continued down the hall.
Maria followed, glad that he wasn’t behind her. “I’m keeping it together. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You’ll probably feel better when you’ve had a shower and some food,” he said. “Not to mention clothes.”
They were both covered only in the tacky, drying synth-amneo fluid. Maria had never wanted a shower more in her life. “Aren’t you a little worried about what we’re going to find when we find your body?” she asked.
Hiro looked back at her. “I learned a while back not to mourn the old shells. If we did, we’d get more and more dour with each life. In fact, I think that may be Wolfgang’s problem.” He frowned. “Have you ever had to clean up the old body by yourself?”
Maria shook her head. “No. It was disorienting; she was looking at me, like she was blaming me. It’s still not as bad as not knowing what happened, though.”
“Or who happened,” said Hiro. “It did have a knife.”
“And it was violent,” Maria said. “It could be one of us.”
“Probably was, or else we should get excited about a first-contact situation. Or second contact, if the first one went so poorly …” Hiro said, then sobered. “But truly anything could have gone wrong. Someone could have woken up from cryo and gone mad, even. Computer glitch messed with the mindmap. But it’s probably easily explained, like someone got caught cheating at poker. Heat of the moment, someone hid an ace, the doctor flipped the table—”
“It’s not funny,” Maria said softly. “It wasn’t madness and it wasn’t an off-the-cuff crime. If that had happened, we wouldn’t have the grav drive offline. We wouldn’t be missing decades of memories. IAN would be able to tell us what’s going on. But someone—one of us—wanted us dead, and they also messed with the personality backups. Why?”
“Is that rhetorical? Or do you really expect me to know?” he asked.
“Rhetorical,” grumbled Maria. She shook her head to clear it. A strand of stiff black hair smacked her in the face, and she winced. “It could have been two people. One killed us, one messed with the memories.”
“True,” he said. “We can probably be sure it was premeditated. Anyway, the captain was right. Let’s be cautious. And let’s make a pact. I’ll promise not to kill you and you promise not to kill me. Deal?”
Maria smiled in spite of herself. She shook his hand. “I promise. Let’s get going before the captain sends someone after us.”
The door to medbay was rimmed in red lights, making it easy to find if ill or injured. With the alert, the lights were blinking, alternating between red and yellow. Hiro stopped abruptly at the entrance. Maria smacked into the back of him in a collision that sent them spinning gently like gears in a clock, making him turn to face the hall while she swung around to see what had stopped him so suddenly.
The contact could have been awkward except for the shock of the scene before them.
In the medbay, a battered, older version of Captain Katrina de la Cruz lay in a bed. She was unconscious but very much alive, hooked up to life support, complete with IV, breathing tubes, and monitors. Her face was a mess of bruises, and her right arm was in a cast. She was strapped to the bed, which was held to the
floor magnetically.
“I thought we all died,” Hiro said, his voice soft with wonder.
“For us all to wake up, we should have. I guess I hit the emergency resurrection switch anyway,” Maria said, pushing herself off the doorjamb to float into the room closer to the captain.
“Too bad you can’t ask yourself,” Hiro said drily.
Penalties for creating a duplicate clone were stiff, usually resulting in the extermination of the older clone. Although with several murders to investigate, and now an assault, Wolfgang would probably not consider this particular crime a priority to punish.
“No one is going to be happy about this,” Hiro said, pointing at the unconscious body of the captain. “Least of all Katrina. What are we going to do with two captains?”
“But this could be good,” Maria said. “If we can wake her up, we might find out what happened.”
“I can’t see her agreeing with you,” he said.
A silver sheet covered the body and drifted lazily where the straps weren’t holding it down. The captain’s clone was still, the breathing tube the only sound.
Maria floated to the closet on the far side of the room. She grabbed a handful of large jumpsuits—they would be too short for Wolfgang, too tight for the doctor, and too voluminous for Maria, but they would do for the time being—and pulled a folded wheelchair from where it drifted in the dim light filtering into the closet.
She handed a jumpsuit to Hiro and donned hers, unselfconsciously not turning away. When humans reach midlife, they may reach a level of maturity where they cease to give a damn what someone thinks about their bodies. Multiply that a few times and you have the modesty (or lack thereof) of the average clone. The first time Maria had felt the self-conscious attitude lifting, it had been freeing. The mind-set remained with many clones even as their bodies reverted to youth, knowing that a computer-built body was closer to a strong ideal than they could have ever created with diet and exercise.
