125: WIPED

Captain Kae Jin asks that the conversation be recorded. “I’m still sedated,” she points out, “and if the story is half as complicated as you’ve all made it sound, either give me a copy I can refer back to or endure being asked to re-explain things you’ve already explained when I forget them.” The Friend pulls a recorder out of a drawer (we have all kinds of independent monitoring and recording equipment lying around, artefacts of our attempt to monitor the safety of the ship without a central AI), and starts recording.

Captain Klees starts talking. Captain Kae Jin listens, occasionally injecting a sharp question. At first, I think Captain Klees is planning to gloss over or avoid some things, maybe not throw the whole story at her at once, but it quickly becomes clear that this would be a bad idea; with any omission or contradiction, she stops him and asks for clarification. Which means that rather soon in the story, he has to admit the uncomfortable truth that most of the crew, including him, are convicts. But Captain Kae Jin just nods, unsurprised. “I’m sorry that you’ve had to go through this,” she says, “given that you lot had less choice than the rest of us in taking these risks.”

“You don’t approve of the whole convict colony plan.”

“Stupid plan. If you can’t fill all the ships, build less ships. Save some money. No need to settle around every star at once. What’s the point in forcing a bunch of convict ‘volunteers’ off their planet forever? They kept telling us that it was fine, that everyone wanted to go, but you don’t ask for volunteers from the Texan system if you want real volunteers. And our descendants, when we settle Hylara – they’ll be sixty five lightyears from Earth; to them, this is essentially the start of humanity, the start of civilisation. This is the start we want to give them? Ancestors who had to be dragged here with death devices in their hearts? That’s the legacy we want to saddle all of human deep-space exploration with? What were they trying to do, turn us into a worse and more blatant form of Luna? They could’ve sent just the one thousand volunteers; we have embryos in storage. But I guess the project doesn’t look as popular and prestigious then, isn’t as politically convenient. Who cares about what colonies you’re setting up in the future if you can get great PR with investors and voters today, right? Anyway. You were saying, Captain?”

Captain Klees haltingly continues his explanation. She accepts most of it with little argument, beyond questioning the occasional contradiction or dropped detail, but flat-out refuses to believe him about the mission that Richard Rynn-Hatson died on. When she hears that I’m the one who investigated the devices he planted under the hull, her eyes once again fix on me, and she asks to see the camera footage from my space suit. We provide it and the doctors, against their own better judgement, help her out of bed and to a terminal to view it. She watches the whole mission several times before finally agreeing that yes, okay, those are an addition that shouldn’t be there and were clearly there when we went to investigate, and yes, their distribution does suggest that Richard was partway through installing them when he fell to his death. And after showing her our records of the gene editing bacteria, and a living sample of the bacteria under blacklight, and the DNA analysis of various tissues of affected and unaffected crew and how Amy’s only victims were from the affected areas, she does reluctantly agree that yes, it looks like Richard probably did add these bacteria to the pods as part of the AI brain hijacking scheme. But there still might be another explanation.

The AI brain hijacking scheme also takes a while to explain. She doesn’t disbelieve us so much as she has a lot of trouble understanding how the hijacking even works (which, fair, I don’t entirely understand it either). We bring Tal in to help explain, but twenty minutes of kem talking at her about the situation does nothing to clear anything up and merely makes the doctors finally insist that we all leave and let the overworked captain get some rest. She reluctantly agrees to try to rest, but asks for copies of Kinoshita’s notes, both the originals and the partly translated version. We get them for her.

“So that’s the other captain, huh?” Tal says as the three of us walk away from the medbay. “She seems nice. Do you think she likes recreated Romero films?”

“I don’t think that’s our primary concern right now,” I say.

“It’s one of our concerns, because we’re going to have to add her and the other revivals to the Movie Night roster. I want to know what tastes they have. I want to be able to prepare myself.”

“We didn’t get up to the part about people on Hylara,” I say. “I kind of want to know what she thinks about that.”

“Forget about Hylara,” Captain Klees says, “we didn’t even get up to the mutiny. She’s definitely going to wonder about that. I mean, she’s a bit distracted with the whole traitor engineer thing right now, but she has to be wondering why I’m the captain and Sands isn’t. What if she reacts badly?”

“What if she does?” I shrug. “She’s bedridden. What’s she going to do, scowl disapprovingly? Anyway, I don’t think she will. From what we’ve seen so far, I think she’ll understand, y’know, self defence.” I think about that for a second. “Or assume I hacked the computer and murdered him.”

“Maybe she’ll be less suspicious of you if you explain why you threatened the CEO with a knife?” he asks hopefully.

I shake my head. “Nope, you’re still not getting that story.”

The doctors don’t let anyone see her again for a full day, and when Captain Klees goes back, I’m not invited. Makes sense; I was only there to add backing if she didn’t trust him, and if she trusts him and not me, well, I’m a liability. But still. I want to see how she reacts to the rest of it. I particularly want to see how she reacts to the explanation of the planetside colony and their puzzling lack of response to us.

Well, maybe I’ll be able to get my hands on the audio recording of the meeting later.

“She’s not happy about our previous captain trying to kill us,” is all Captain Klees tells me. “The Friend had to threaten to sedate her if she couldn’t calm down.”

The next day, following a priority list drawn up by Captain Kae Jin, we get to work reviving more crew. After a couple of unfortunate failures, Nae Asteria comes out of her chronostasis pod breathing on their own. They’re Martian, with the classic fragile Martian fingernails and a very unclassic un-Martian name, and completely bald like most professional astronauts. The senior comptech, Harrian Tayne, might be dead, but Asteria is the secondary tech and I for one am hoping that she might be able to do something with out computer systems, maybe help set up some more systems so we have to do less things manually, or find any Bits Of Amy That Could Kill Us that Tal might have missed. Captain Kae Jin is asleep when Asteria wakes in the medbay for the first time, which is unfortunate since I imagine hearing about the various disasters she slept through in chronostasis would probably be much easier coming from her captain than a bunch of strangers, but the doctors don’t even consider waking the sleeping captain for it. I happen to be getting my new skin inspected (it’s fine), so I see Lina call for Captain Klees and hear his halting, much-abridged explanation of the immediately relevant key points.

Asteria asks to see Tal, and requests Amy’s backup files. ‘Installing the AI again wholesale is probably a bad idea with the sabotage, but we can pull some clean functions out of it to make this place less of a death trap.”

Tal shakes kes head. “They’re wiped.”

Asteria frowns. “What do you mean, wiped?”

“Wiped. Don’t exist. I’ve checked the systems. The drives are blank.”

“They can’t be blank. I verified them myself, with my own eyes.”

“Before or after launch?”

Asteria doesn’t answer that. Their lips tighten, and they look thoughtful.

“Maybe Amy destroyed them?” I suggest. “It did break a lot of systems.”

Tal shakes kes head again. “Nah. They’re stored on separate drives that aren’t connected to anything. Just sitting in storage, not even physically plugged in. At least, they’re supposed to be.”

“Do you have Keiko’s diaries still?” Asteria asks.

“Uh, yeah. The cap had ‘em last. Your cap, I mean.”

“This Friend has them,” the Friend says, and pulls them out of a drawer under the computer terminal. It hands the books and a print of Renn’s translations to Asteria, who flips through them. “You think you can make sense of them?”

Asteria shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe not. Japanese and Korean aren’t all that similar, but they’re a lot more similar than the Interlingua. Keiko and I weren’t close, but we went through training together and I saw a bit of her shorthand. I can see if you’ve made any big errors, at least.” She glances at the translation sheets. “Who did the translation?”

The rest of us look at each other. Captain Klees had skipped over the whole Sands’ crew part in his explanation of the situation. It’ll come up, of course, but there’s no need to dump everything on every revival patient individually.

“He’s… deceased,” Captain Klees says.

“My condolences. You got a pen?”

The Friend has a pen. Asteria settles down to read, apparently dismissing us from her personal universe. Captain Klees turns to the Friend. “The next revival – ”

“Not until we’ve finished assessing Asteria,” the Friend says firmly. “We have room for eight, but it would be a bad idea to fill all the beds without assessing how much care each patient needs. What if the next six survivors are all in Captain Kae Jin’s condition? If this Friend and Lina don’t have enough time for each patient, the health risks go up. We don’t hit orbit for over one and a half months. Alive is better than fast.”

“Hey, hey, I agree with you.” Captian Klees raises his hands. “I was going to say the same thing.”

“Ah.” It relaxes. “Apologies. This friend is used to taking medical orders from…” it glances at Asteria… “less sensible people.”

Sands. Who it doesn’t want to mention right now and necessitate a whole explanation.

My new skin having passed muster, I head for the Greenhouse Ring. I’m a little nervous about waking other people with my job. Not in psychology; the psychologists can take that job, no problem. But what if the other gardeners think I’ve done a bad job of maintaining their greenhouse ring? I don’t know a whole lot about dirt-based gardening that I didn’t learn during the last four years. Maybe I’ve done something fundamentally wrong and ruined everything.

I mean, the ring won’t live for much longer anyway. It doesn’t matter. But still. What if they come in here and see what a mess I’ve made of it?

And the bees… we have to think of a safe way to take the bees down. Which is, of course, ridiculous; we have frozen bees for taking to the planet, there’s no reason to take these ones with us. It makes a lot more sense to humanely kill them and start fresh with frozen colonies. But, well… they’re our bees. This ship has been their home, and their ancestors’ home, for over a century. I feel like we should take them with us.

And I’m going to sound stupid trying to explain that to the gardeners. Everything I do is going to look stupid to the gardeners.

Everything any of us do must look so stupid to the real astronauts.

I kneel down and start aggressively weeding. Those fucking dandelions are back, making me look like a sloppy gardener. Why can’t they just do their job of improving the soil and then die off? They don’t have a job here any more, that can’t be done better by other plants.

They don’t have anything to do except exist and be redundant.