099: TAL

The medbay is empty except for me, Tal, and the two of Lina’s comatose science projects who survived the problems of the computer shutdown and subsequent transfer to this ring. Tal sits on the end of the unoccupied bed, looking at kes hands. Not at me.

I have no idea what to do here. I learned as much as I could about psychology in the brief time before this session, but fuck. Not for the first time, I wish our psychologist hadn’t been violently murdered by a cultist.

“How are you feeling?” I try.

Tal shrugs. “Fine.” A lie, obviously. But ke’s not crying, which is… good, right? Ke looks exhausted, probably from being up half the night chasing potentially fatal computer problems. “Things are going pretty well. There’s not much need for attitude adjustment and rotational control now that the ring disengagement is over so I’ve damped down the rate at which those systems are allowed to correct for things. Extreme changes are Sam’s responsibility as our navigator and pilot, and manual. Atmosphere control is entirely on manual, and we scrounged some atmospheric analysing equipment from supplies, the stuff the colonists will use, to independently verify the computer’s readings. I had Denish physically cut all the locks on the airlocks between the rings we’re using – just the locks, not the seals, they still work as airlocks just fine – and put bolts on all external airlocks so they can’t ever be opened without someone manually unlocking them physically with their hands. I’ve put in priority systems for system shutoff order in power or overheat conservation modes, so if there is a problem it’ll start with… just the lights will…” kes voice catches. After a couple of deep breaths, ke continues. “So we’ll have warning by the priority shutdown of non-critical systems. Short of a sudden and unexpected power failure, like the reactor just blowing up or something, there shouldn’t be any threats to our lives that we don’t have time to respond to.”

I nod. “And how are you handling…” oh rootrot, I am so out of my depth, I don’t know anything about how Texans deal with death except that it absolutely nothing like how Arboreans do… “the loss?”

Another shaky breath. “W-well, there’s been so many disasters already. At this stage we’re lucky that any of us are alive.”

Hopelessness? Hopelessness is unacceptable. If we give up, we die. But, no; this is deflection. I know Tal well enough to know the difference. Tal’s distractable and accidentally deflective at the best of times, usually unintentionally, but when ke’s doing it on purpose, I can tell.

“Although maybe we can be a zombie crew. Hey, did you ever see that latest reconstruction of the Dawn of the Dead sequel? Because that whole ‘zombie crew’ scene I think they made up. I don’t think they accurately interpreted the script fragments in regard to – ”

“Tal.”

“I’m fine, okay? What else can I be? I’m fine, and you don’t have to worry. I’m not going to kill off any more crew.”

Ah, right. Tal’s dealing with more than grief. Guilt, too. I know what that’s like.

Don’t know what to do about it, though. What am I supposed to say? ‘I’m sure it wasn’t your fault’? ‘You’re not responsible for the computer deciding to kill a bunch of crew just because you’re the one who stole a former captain’s identity long enough to enable it to’? I don’t blame Tal, really I don’t, but I also don’t think any platitudes from me is going to convince kem of that, especially when I have only the vaguest understanding of what actually happened.

“Tal. Yesterday, at the computer, you said you told the AI to do what it did. What did you mean by that?”

“I… talk to Amy sometimes. Or used to, I guess. About random stuff. It’s just something I’ve always done with AIs. I don’t… it’s a bit weird, I know, but I just like talking, and they can usually respond well enough without me having to actually impose on another person. They let me get to the end of a thought, which real people never do.”

I think, with a sudden stab of not entirely unjustified guilt, of the dozens, hundreds, thousands of conversations involving Tal in the past where I’d cut kem off mid-explanation to move a conversation along or avoid derailing it. I bite my lip and stay silent.

“Of course, with Amy, once I figured out what she was, it became actually important to do so. I’m not sure how much I could actually affect her logic, I don’t know how coherent the data she was putting in those colonist brains was, but I had to try, right? I tried to keep her briefed on the situation, on goings-on on the ship. I also tend to… vent, a lot. That was a big mistake, I think. I shouldn’t have done that once I realised what she was. Shouldn’t have ever let myself be emotional. But it’s, I’m stressed and angry basically all the time here, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

I hadn’t. I could count the number of times I’d seen Tal stressed or angry on Tinera’s one good hand. More lack of perception. It’s probably good that I’m not captain any more.

“I liked Sands more than most of us, I think, but he’d still make some not great decisions and I’d tell Amy, appealing to her for information mostly. I spent a lot of time trying to get her to trust me about the brain hijacked colonists, explaining that Sands was going to charge on ahead and wake people up and we needed her help to make sure it wasn’t her people, and – ”

“That’s absurdly dangerous!” I cut in, forgetting for a moment that I’m supposed to be providing therapy. “Do you remember what it did to your chronostasis ring when it thought we were trying to kill off her colonists in there? And you told it we were aiming for CR5 specifically?”

“I thought I could make her understand! I don’t think I got her to understand anything, in the end. I don’t think she even realised that we were going to wake up CR5 people specifically, or why. But I did have to badmouth Sands quite a lot in the attempt. And then… then there was the coup, and… Aspen, you have to understand, we couldn’t be sure who to trust. Renn and one of the Friends had been murdered and we were suddenly locked up and had no idea what had happened, and this was pretty soon after the Helithing with Captain Klees, and we were all getting used to the fact that half of us were science experiments and Sands kept playing stupid games where he’d have everyone harassing us and we had no idea how many of them knew what they were doing or were actually trying to help or could’ve done the murders and blamed us or, or anything. And then suddenly I wake up to one of the heart alarms and then you guys – and we had no way of knowing who was involved at this point and who wasn’t – were trying to kill us! The ID chips are implanted in bone, you realise that? And we didn’t have access to a medbay or proper surgical tools? We had to cut them out of bone with what we had, with the tools we could scrounge up in a habitation ring with no advance warning.We nearly died before we could escape. And then we had to confine all of you, and it was obvious at that point that most of you were innocent but we couldn’t, we couldn’t take any chances, and I was so worried that locking you guys in by removing the ID chips wouldn’t work. Leaving them in wasn’t an option, we’d shown how easily that could be bypassed, bur I also knew that Amy can track crew members without the chips because she had no trouble tracking and explaining Reimann’s fate. The security systems should be tied to the ID chip directly, but she’d been able to bypass so many things that she shouldn’t be able to… I had to make sure she understood that the people in that ring had to stay locked in that ring. I had to make sure she understood that you were all a danger to the ship, for now.”

I’m not breathing, I realise. Oh, yeah, that’d do it. This AI had scrapped and altered and jailbroken so many of its systems to kill Reimann when he was a danger. When it had thought we were trying to do his task, it had exploited its own trashed emergency protocols to try to suffocate the perpetrators in CR1. And now Tal had told it that half the crew were a danger to the ship, and Tal gave it back control of the air systems, and those dangerous people didn’t have the ID chips that were supposed to force it to maintain livable conditions so it didn’t even need to exploit any broken emergency protocols. Just pipe in the carbon monoxide until the danger goes away.

“Why does the ship even have carbon monoxide in those quantities?” I ask. “Why is it hooked up into the ventilation system like that? Why is it even an option the AI had available?”

“What?” Tal asks.

“Nothing. Sorry.” This is about Tal, not the ship. But what am I supposed to say to Tal? ‘This wasn’t your fault’? There’s no way I can get kem to believe that. There’s no way I can even get kem to believe that I believe that.

“This wasn’t your fault,” I say anyway.

Ke just looks away.

“Do you remember the dreams?” ke asks, after several seconds of silence.

“Dreams?”

“From chronostasis. From the eight or so months asleep. Do you remember them?”

“Um. Not really? I’ve never been great with dreams, and I kind of had a lot going on when I woke up.”

“So did I. But I’ve always been good with dreams. I can remember some. Just normal dream stuff, so far as I remember. But I have to wonder. The brains Amy took. What did they experience? When she fed them data to get data back, do you think they experienced any part of what was actually going on in any coherent way?”

“I have no idea. That sounds like a question for the doctors.”

“I already asked. They didn’t know. But I can’t stop wondering what it’s like. Like, when Amy took a new brain… was that them, feeling overwhelmed by undefined work they could never get on top of? And reaching for more resources? When Reimann started dragging them out of their chronostasis pods, did they dream of the monster pursuing them, and act in their minds to stop it?” Ke looks up and meets my eyes again. “And those two thousand people that we killed. You and me. Amy was feeding data to so many of them. Do you think they understood, on any level, that they were dying?”

“I don’t… I don’t know, Tal.”

“You know, they say.” Tal give a hysterical little giggle. “They say. That if you die in a dream, you die in real life.” Ke starts giggling properly, giggling until ke’s crying. I pull myself out of my doctor-mandated bed to hug kem tightly, for several minutes, and just let kem cry.

Some time later, Tal pulls back. Wipes kes eyes. Musters a smile.

“Thanks,” ke says. “I feel a lot better.”

Tal’s a very bad liar.