111: SCAN

I’m chopping vegetables and handing them to Captain Klees for a morning omelette when Lina strolls in. “Captain, do you mind retaking some scans? I’ve just about wrapped up your health assessment but we’re getting some strange results. A scanner error, I think.”

Captain Klees’ eyes widen. “Cancer?”

“No. We haven’t found any more indicators of cancer in the genetically engineered crew than in anyone else. I’m pretty sure it’s a problem with the machine or the dye.”

The captain relaxes. I frown. “No more than anyone else?”

Lina shrugs. “Everyone’s got some indications that they might have cancer pretty much all the time. Bodies are complicated. So is cancer. But we’ve found no cause for undue alarm in the genetically engineered crew specifically.”

“What are you getting errors with?” I ask.

“I’d rather not get into it until I’ve rerun the scans. Undue alarm and all that, y’know. But if we can tuck that away this afternoon then I can move onto the next patient on the list.”

“Who’s next?”

“The Friend, I believe.”

“No problem,” Captain Klees says. “I can come in after breakfast, if that works for you?”

“Sounds good.”

We eat omelettes. I check the atmosphere in all currently active rings and that all emergency space suits are in good order. I feed the chickens, maintain the greenhouse, and start the honey harvest. It’s a full ten hours later that I’m called into the medbay and a tired-looking Friend asks if I wouldn’t mind starting on my medical tests right away.

“No problem,” I say, as the Friend hands me a cup of tracer fluid to drink, “but why?”

“Because,” captain Klees says from his position crowded around the terminal monitor with Lina and Tal, “my synnerves aren’t showing up.”

“Your synnerves?” I gulp the horrible tracer down. “You guys are rescanning our synnerves? Why? They’re not going to change!”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Captain Klees says bitterly.

“Synnerves don’t break down in the body,” Lina confirms, “but the captain said to test absolutely everything so we’re testing absolutely everything. At first I thought it might just be a bad batch of tracer, but I’ve run the captain’s scan using four different bottles now, and run my own using the last three to confirm. Mine show up fine. The machine is in perfect working order. Best guess is that the captain’s body is rejecting the dye somehow.”

“The CR1 and 5 genetic engineering? Could it – ?”

“Nope. I ran Tal’s, they show up normally. Besides, the images the friend took of captain Klees’ synnerves after waking up from chronostasis are crystal clear. This is a new development.”

“How?”

“My guess? Allergy to the dye. It bonded fine the first time, but now the immune system’s on the alert for it and it doesn’t work any more. That’s just a guess, though.”

“They’re monitoring me for a reaction, but the neurostimulators make it difficult to detect one, so we need to wait for the white cell counts to run,” Captain Klees adds.

“This Friend was just scanned,” the Friend adds, “with the same result. No synnerves in the image. Lina is reluctant to experiment due to this friend’s autoimmune flare-up awhile back.”

“Why would you and – ? Ah. DIVR-32.”

“That’s our best guess,” Lina nods. “But I’m sure that the captain and the Friend have more things in common than just that one gene. But if yours don’t show up either…”

“Then it’s that much more likely that we can add another thing to the Weird DIVR Allergies. We can’t have synnerve scans, or lemons.”

“Maybe. We should wait for results before trying to draw any wild conclusions.”

“What ship have you been on?” Tal asks. “Everything here is wild conclusions.”

“Well, yes. But we should reach them scientifically, through proper procedure, by ruling out the less wild ones first.”

“Sounds like a waste of time to me.”

It takes four hours to metabolise the dye, so I have a nap and the Friend wakes me up when it’s time. It’s a fairly simple medical scan, but for some reason the entire crew has found a reason to be in the general vicinity of the medbay. I lie in the machine, wait, and a few minutes later the entire crew is crowded around the medbay terminal, staring at the screen.

“Well,” Tinera says. “That’s anticlimactic.”

The synnerves stand out bright and clear on the image, captured with the perfection of an operator who has done this a few dozen times by now. Originating from the stimulator, gathered in the brain, spread out into the body, just like always.

“So it’s not a DIVR-32 allergy to the dye?” I ask.

Lina shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes such things take several exposures to trigger. Sometimes other genes interfere. It certainly means that we can’t be sure of a link to DIVR-32, which is annoying.”

“But it doesn’t rule a DIVR-32 connection out?” Sam asks.

“Not if there are other confounding factors, no. I might poke around in storage and see if we have some other tracer that has any level of binding to synnerves. If we can get even a faint image of the captain and the Friend, we can – ”

“Hang on,” I say. “That image is wrong.”

“What do you mean, it’s wrong?”

“I mean that my synnerves don’t look like that.”

Frowning, Lina taps at the keyboard. A second image comes up; my previous synnerve scan, from shortly after waking up. And they are different.

In the earlier scan, a particularly invasive synnerve had grown all the way down to my right hand. It’s not visible on the new image. In fact, all of the longer nerves in my limbs are slightly shorter, cutting off just above the elbows and knees.

“Okay,” I say. “So what the fuck does that mean?”

“Well, it’s… not an allergy or intolerance of the dye.”

“Partial reaction?” Captain Klees asks.

Lina shakes her head. “In that case, the whole scan would be fainter. It wouldn’t be missing the ends of a few nerves like that.”

“It’s not damage to the synnerves themselves, is it?” I ask.

“I don’t see how it could be. Again, look where they stop – if something was breaking down your synnerves somehow, it wouldn’t start at the ends of each limb and perfectly destroy them moving up the body, all near-symmetrically like that. It would be destroying bits throughout the whole body, or centred on the impact site of whatever’s causing the damage. All four limbs in lockstep? I can’t see how that would happen.”

“So what does it mean, then?”

“Well, if I were looking at this image in isolation, I’d say there’s something wrong with the scanner.  That’s usually what causes very regular blank spots like this. But it worked perfectly for everyone else except the other two DIVRs, for whom it didn’t work at all. So. I have no idea.”

“Maybe there’s something about them that fucks up the machine,” Tal suggests. “Maybe they’re magnetic or something.”

“All three of them went through extensive medical tests and scans before boarding and over the years they’ve been awake on this ship. Furthermore, all three of them had this scan earlier and it worked. I don’t think you can just develop magnetism due to being in space with the wrong DNA. Besides, the captain had an MRI yesterday and it’s perfectly clear.”

“We were so close,” Captain Klees sighs. “So, so close to making it to the planet without any more weird mysteries like this.”

“The high viability category,” I say.

“What?”

“Of chronostatic colonists. Those of us who have the best chance of surviving chronostasis with these synnerves. DIVRs. It might not be a new weird mystery. It might be more information for an existing mystery.”

“Captain Kinoshita’s notes said that the scientists thought they had a breakthrough on that mystery,” Sam says. “They died investigating it.”

“Do we know anything about it?” Captain Klees asks.

“Of something she barely mentioned, in a language none of us speak, in shorthand? Not very much.”

“Tal, if you ever have time on top of everything else you’re doing, poke around and see if those scientists kept any digital records.”

“Already on my list, captain.”

“Excellent.”

“As fun as Even More Bullshit always is,” Tinera says, “I’m off to bed. I – ”

She’s cut off by an alarm. Not a real alarm, chosen to be memorable and hard to ignore; a Tal-set alarm, which can be any fucking thing. In this case it’s a very brief audio clip of a man yelling in a language I don’t understand. The blood drains from Tal and Sam’s face in almost perfect unison; they stare at each other, open-mouthed.

“Might be a false positive,” Tal says, taking over the computer terminal and typing rapid commands that I don’t understand.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Oh, it’s from this great preneek comedy called Third Rock From The Sun. Only nine episodes were ever recovered but it’s a work of genius. He’s saying ‘Incoming Message from the Big Giant Head.’” Kes typing doesn’t even slow as ke explains.

“What is the alarm for, Tal?”

“It’s the radio alarm,” Sam says, an edge of panic in their voice. “It means that somehow, the Courageous has received a coherent radio message.”