109: NORMAL

When Lina takes my arm to insert the needle, I stiffen automatically. She hesitates. “If you’re uncomfortable with me, the Friend can do this,” she tells me.

I shake my head. “I’m sure you won’t kill me for my organs on a spaceship.” I try to make it sound like a joke, but I don’t think I quite manage it.

Nevertheless, she doesn’t say anything as she slides the needle in and starts to draw blood.

“So,” I say into the awkward silence, “what’s this for? I never seem to be able to hold onto all my blood for very long on this ship.”

That gets a small smile. “Just a basic vitamin analysis and cell counts. We’re getting close to Hylara and our dear captain wants thorough checkups for everyone before we land, so we’re getting the general stuff out of the way first. In a few months or so I’ll call you back in for all the scans. Full x-ray, heart check, synnerves, the usual.”

“Wow, you are being thorough. We already know what everyone’s synnerves look like! They’re not exactly going to change!”

She nods and rolls her eyes. “Captain Nitpick says absolutely everything. And since we’re on a sabotaged, AI-less ship that’s falling apart around us, some of those nitpicks are probably going to save our lives so I’m not going to argue about the other ones. I hope you like swallowing radioactive tracers.”

“We scanned most things chasing up that genetic engineering mystery a couple of years ago,” I mumble. “At this rate, the scans’ll give us cancer.”

“Good thing you have a really good oncologist aboard, then.” She puts my blood in a vial and caps it, then sticks the vial into a machine. “All done. But while you’re here, want to see a fun little medical mystery?”

“I never want to see another mystery in my life, but I’m sure if you don’t tell me now it’ll just come up later.”

“Probably not. I don’t think it’s all that important. Just interesting.” But when she heads for the computer, I follow her, because this might as well happen.

She brings up a short list of names and their revival viability. I recognise Sienna Kae Jin, at the top.

“The first crew,” she explains. She indicates the viability column. “Notice anything interesting?”

“Um. Not really? There’s a 93%, presumably a DIVR, and the rest are in the expected range. We would’ve noticed way back at the start if they weren’t.” I frown at the screen. “Am I supposed to be noticing something unusual?”

“Nope.” Lina grins. “They are all in the same range as all the other colonists. Isn’t that quite interesting?”

I shrug. We’ve been over this, I’m certain we’ve been over this. “It tells us that the viability drop happened after they went under, and probably isn’t dependent on length of time in chronostasis. We already knew this. We know they’re not higher than the oth – ”

“Oh yes, we know they’re not higher. What I can’t believe I didn’t notice years ago is that they’re not lower. Captain Kae Jin’s crew should have a lower viability than the other colonists, and they don’t.”

“Lower? Why?”

“Age. Chronostasis is only recommended for people – ”

“Aged twenty three to forty, I know. So did Earth, when this ship was staffed. All of the crew members would be below the age of thirty, so that by the end of their shift – ah. I see. Their ten year shift became a twenty year shift. I assume none of them were below twenty when the ship launched so…”

“So every one of these people were over the age of forty when they went under.” She taps the viability column again. “That alone should drop their viability by up to thirty per cent, for the older ones. Now, one or two people being lucky would be normal, but the entire crew being resilient to the age risks. No. And yet…”

“The risks aren’t cumulative,” I breathe. “Whatever it is about the weird synnerves that caused this viability drop with the brainjacking project, it’s not on top of the age risk. It absorbs the age risk. If someone’s old enough, the synnerve thing probably wouldn’t even add any additional…” my eyes land on the 93% figure. “There’s no chance that the DIVR-32 geneset makes one resistant to the effects of going under while too old, is there?”

“No, none. A DIVR over forty is in as much risk as anyone else. And that crew member is a DIVR, I checked.”

“So it’s not just that the age risks and whatever risk caused this viability drop aren’t cumulative. It’s that the age risk does not exist with these new kinds of synnerves. These are safer for older people – well, older DIVRs, at least.”

“Possibly, yes. It’s also possible that our single DIVR was very lucky. We can’t draw any solid conclusions from a single example. But, given that it’s not cumulative with the viability drop in the others… it is certainly possible, that the safe age range for these synnerves is at least a decade longer than the normal kind.”

“Except for the whole, you know. Viability in the sixties thing.”

“Yes, but that was triggered somehow. We know that because we know approximately when it happened, from Kinoshita’s notes, and that it happened to this crew and to the existing colonists, so it’s not a factor of time. Avoiding that trigger, whatever it is, gives us an expanded safe age range for chronostasis. Which isn’t particularly useful for us; it’s not like we’ll be launching ships of older colonists from Hylara any time soon. But it’s still interesting.”

I look at the list of crew again and it strikes me, really strikes me for the first time, that these people spent almost half of their life so far running this ship. They were in their twenties when the ship launched, and they spent twenty years dedicating themselves to shepherding colonists like me safely to our destination. This ship has consumed their adult lives, so far. It’s probably more home to them, more familiar to them, than the planet they left behind. Do they even still miss looking up at an open sky? Well. Maybe that’ll make the adjustment to living in domes on Hylara easier.

And there’s something else too, I realise.

“They chose to go under late.”

Lina frowns. “What do you mean?”

“Back after the engines failed. They chose not to turn back, chose to continue the journey much slower. And they also chose to split shifts evenly with Reimann’s crew. They didn’t have to; they had a perfectly justifiable reason for doing their ten years and going under when they were still within the safe age range and making Reimann’s crew do thirty. But they split shifts evenly. So, either they crunched the numbers, decided that Reimann’s crew doing thirty years put the ship in even more danger, and decided to nobly risk the increased viability drop for the good of the colony, or…”

“Or they knew that going under while older was safer,” Lina concludes.

“Do you think they knew?”

She shakes her head. “Everything about this gives me the impression that nobody knew much of anything. Kinoshita’s notes suggest that the viability drop itself may have been a surprise, and that the DIVR-32 resistance to it was definitely a surprise, or at least based on an unknown mechanism. And while we know that at least one of Sienna Kae Jin’s crew was in on the whole brainjacking conspiracy, the behaviour of the rest of the crew suggests that the whole crew definitely wasn’t. Ro Da-bin certainly wasn’t, because she was in CR5, which is practically suicide if she knew. Come to think of it, if any of them knew to expect an almost forty per cent chance of dying in chronostasis, would they have even boarded? I wouldn’t.”

I nod. I wouldn’t, either. “Honestly, at this stage, I’ve decided I no longer care. Whoever’s involved in all the nonsense done to this ship is either dead, or we’ll wake them up later and find out if it ever actually becomes relevant. If they wanted this ship not to reach Hylara, they would’ve destroyed it already, so at this stage I don’t think there’s all that much more that anyone’s going to do. I have decided that the whole conspiracy can go fuck itself. I am interested in no further mystery. Only answers to existing mysteries, if you happen to have them on hand.”

“I do, actually.”

“… You do?”

Lina grins. “Tal found Dr Oglo’s patient notes when poking around the computer system and was able to bypass their privacy code through some process I don’t understand, without the AI in the way. They used the same privacy code for their notes taken without AI access, after the Reimann incident.”

“We know how the crew up the front of the ship died?”

“We know how the crew up the front of the ship died.”

“Great! How?”

“Mostly? Pneumonia.”

I frown. “Pneumonia? Just… normal pneumonia?”

“So far as the doctors could determine, yes.”

“Did some weird superbug get loose or something?”

“Not to my knowledge. The ship supplies are distributed across all the storage rings, but not completely evenly. The storage that the fore crew had access to had almost no antibiotics. They also had no access to the labs or medbays. My guess is that the microbially contaminated air, which they had no control over because they had no AI access and Reimann had frozen those systems anyway, was a continual assault on their lungs until something took hold. They started cultures from cryo to generate antibiotics once the problem was known, but whatever took hold was resistant to traquamycin. Oglo’s notes cut off shortly after noting that they can’t get their other cultures producing enough, so my guess is, they failed.”

“Just normal bacteria. From air filter contamination. And humidity.”

“And a couple of accidents. They lost two engineers trying to access the back of the ship and use the AI by going outside. As we already knew, the external airlocks in the aft area had been locked by Captain Kinoshita. One of the maintenance crew had a nasty fall when there was some kind of gravity manoeuvre that I assume the people down the back had the AI do, for reasons we don’t know, and the front wasn’t warned. They didn’t have access to most of the ship data, being cut off from most of the data storage, and with no AI to retrieve it anyway.”

I nod, remembering my own difficulties getting the fore engine on and getting back to the back of the ship.

“They clearly tried to do what they could to control the air quality. But continually replacing the air filters can only do so much.”

“They didn’t replace all the air filters,” I point out, “or we wouldn’t have found Reimann’s arm in the fucking wall.”

“Dr Oglo notes that they couldn’t find all the ship schematics, after they lost all the engineers. I suspect that by the time they realised the air was a problem, there wasn’t anybody in any useful state who actually knew where every single air filter was. They are, I’m sure you noticed, not externally labelled, since the engineers were trained on where they were and how to maintain them.”

I stare at her. “You cannot be fucking serious. You’re telling me that the arm in the vents and the mysterious die-off of the front crew comes down to a bunch of people breathing totally normal bad air who just don’t know where some of the filters are? That’s the running theory?”

“Do you have a better one?”

“It’s so… stupid! And normal!”

“Many things on this ship are stupid.”

“Nothing on this ship is normal!”

She shrugs. “You wanted sensible answers, didn’t you? Would you have preferred another complicated conspiracy?”

“No,” I sigh. “I guess not. Dying of normal infection without antibiotics just seems so ridiculous, next to the brainjacking computer deaths and the genetically engineered crewmates and all that.”

“Ah, yes. Out of all of those things, it’s the pneumonia that’s weird.”