098: LOBOTOMY

“What do you mean, you told her to?” I ask.

“And why now?” Lina asks.

“She did it now because she couldn’t before. I restored her proper environmental controls and she went straight to it.”

“You restor – you cracked Reimann’s password?”

“Oh, yeah. Turns out it was really easy. I can’t believe it took me so long to think of it, it should’ve been obvious as soon as we found his arm in that wall.” Ke touches the bleeding wound on kes arm.

“Reimann’s chip?”

“Yep. Backdoor password recovery. Only Reimann could request it, so I put the chip in deep enough to register my pulse and nerve activity and got to work guessing his security answers from his information on file. It took less than ten minutes. I restored all of Amy’s locked functions – she had a really annoying robot voice by the way, definitely would’ve changed that if she was still complete enough to use it now – and she started killing crew.”

“Okay, but what did you mean that you told her to kill – ”

“Is everyone alright?” Captain Klees asks, jogging into the ring. “What’s going on? What happened to CR5?”

“I ejected CR5,” Tal summarises as everyone except the stranded Denish and Tinera pile into the ring. “Amy’s dead. An unknown number of ship’s systems are compromised or damaged.”

“When you say ‘an unknown number’…”

“Anything Amy was in control of could be compromised.”

“W-why… how…?” Captain Klees closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “No, never mind, that can wait. Doctors. Assuming any ship system could be compromised, what are the dangers to us, in order of how quickly they can kill us?”

“Acceleration,” Lina says immediately. “Tal’s dealing with it, but acceleration could kill someone within seconds, through pressure or through slamming us into something.”

“Then compression or decompression,” the Friend adds. “If the air pressure is messed with, through pumps or through airlock failure, that’s a concern. Then… is radiation a concern? If the electrostatic shield fails?”

“The electrostatic shield is for space dust,” Sam says. “The ship’s hull itself has the radiation shielding.”

“So there’s no situation where someone’ll be irradiated without also asphyxiating,” the Friend says. “Alright then.”

“Speaking of which, asphyxiation would be next on the list,” Lina says. “And death via deadly gas, as the ship has already been shown to be capable of.” She glances at me.

The Friend nods. “Then probably temperature. Overheating specifically. Everything after that is slightly longer-term. Dehydration and starvation, if we lose access to the storage rings, or water contamination…”

“Infection,” Lina cuts in. “If the air filtration systems fail then the humidity is going to spike. If this place gets warm and wet it’s basically a petri dish.  Remember how the air filters got fucked over the first time. Not to mention the potential damage to electronics and medical equipment.”

“Thank you, that’s enough,” Captain Klees says. “Tal, do everything you can to protect us from those first three – acceleration, air pressure, and air contamination. As soon as you’ve done that, your main focus is safeguarding the three remaining chronostasis rings. We’re not losing colonists to computer errors today and we don’t have the facilities to deal with three thousand emergency revivals. Do whatever you need to to keep them alive, stable, and in chronostasis. Everyone else, whatever I’m about to tell you to do takes second place to if Tal needs your help with the colonists.”

“Yes, captain,” Tal says, typing.

“Right. Doctors, get the right ID chips in everyone again. If we’ve lost the main AI then any residual systems are going to be locating people based entirely on chip positions and I don’t want any more Habitation Ring 1 incidents. Aspen, back to the medbay.”

“I can help!” I protest.

“You’re literally sitting on the floor right now. Medbay, and spend your time there listing whatever you want to keep from Greenhouse 2, because we’re shutting it down.”

“We’re shutting it down?”

“Yes. The entire back of the ship. We can’t move the chronostatic colonists, but everything else critical is moving to the front of the ship. We want to minimise the spaces that can actually affect us if they’re compromised and minimise the amount of ship that needs to be maintained; you can keep Greenhouse Ring 1 since it’s right next to critical medical facilities anyway, but all rings behind Greenhouse Ring 1, we’re evacuating until it’s time to approach Hylara. Everyone, move everything – and I mean everything – that you want to use over the next few years to the front of the ship. We’ll live between Greenhouse Ring 1 and Habitation Ring 1, and keep the rings fore of that pressurised for engine access for the engineers and astronavigation. The rest of the ship is off-limits except in case of an emergency.”

Sam bit their lip uncertainly. “That’s a pretty confined space for so many people.”

“It’s plenty of space. All throughout history, people have lived in much more confined spaces in much more crowded conditions, for far longer than three and a half years. So, moving everything is what I want everyone who doesn’t have a job to be doing, unless you’re assisting Tal. Tinera and Denish will join you once they have access to this part of the ship again. Also, I’m ordering compulsory psychological counselling for everyone. Aspen, prepare for that.”

“Yes, captain. Who’s the assistant psychologist, by the way?”

“I am,” Lina says.

“The two psychologists psyching each other is pretty bad psychological practice,” the Friend points out.

Captain Klees nods. “I’m well aware, but we have to work with what we have. Frankly, if we can get to Hylara with a shipful of colonists and all eight of us still breathing and not pulling a Reimann, I’ll consider that a win. On that note, we’re going to locate some radios in this place and I want everyone to carry one at all times. We should be able to communicate at all times.”

The shock that greets this statement is a lot less than I expect. It’s mostly just Sam and me.

“Um,” Sam says. “At all times?”

“Yes. Everyone, at all times.”

Sam and I exchange a wary glance. “That’s a bad habit to get into,” I point out.

“No, it’s not. It’s fine. We’re already able to detect each other with the computer system at all times anyway, this is just more efficient. For situations such as – for example – two of our crew getting stranded in another part of the ship while a ring ejects and probably freaking out and having no idea what’s going on. I’m sure we can all agree that being able to communicate with Tinera and Denish right now – ”

“Tinera’s trying to talk to us,” Tal cut in.

“What?”

“The computer terminals aren’t connected while the ring’s ejecting, but she’s got a space suit on. She’s sending us footage, but we can’t talk back through the computer, obviously.”

Captain Klees nods. “Can someone get a space suit to talk back?”

“I’ll get one,” the Friend says, heading off.

“Thank you. On that note, when we’re moving supplies around, I want eight space suits in every single inhabited ring, and everyone needs to know where they are. We need to be ready for an emergency to happen at any time, in any place. We’ll take a couple of days to get situated, then shut down life support on the rest of the ship. So I’ll also want cameras and other monitoring systems – independent ones, not the ones that are part of the ship – in the chronostasis rings for remote monitoring of the colonists.”

“Um,” Sam says, “to be clear, captain… you want to put all of us in the ring that nearly half our crew just died in?”

Captain Klees goes suddenly still. The blood drains from his face as his gaze flicks between Sam and myself, the two crew members who narrowly survived death in that very ring by chance – me because of my genes, Sam because of a coincidence of timing. “Shit,” he says. “You’re right. We can’t… okay. Okay, we’ll use the other habitat ring, and we’ll have to… uh…”

“That won’t work,” I say. “You were right; we need to be at the front of the ship. That’s where the engine we’re using is and where most of the important navigation equipment is. This place is broken; the engineers need regular access to those engines and Sam needs navigational data and I just know the computer is going to refuse to give it at range for some stupid inconvenient reason. We can’t make them walk across a whole shut down ship constantly, it’s asking for trouble.”

“We can’t ask people to sleep in that ring, either. Especially you, Aspen.”

I shrug. “If it doesn’t work out, we can set up beds in the storage ring or the recreation ring. It’s not like we need shelter from the weather.”

“Captain,” Lina says, “the people on life support?”

Captain Klees shakes his head. “I don’t think we can trust the reliability of the systems or waste resources on them. You can move them all forward and spend a couple of days taking whatever tissue samples you want from them, but then you’re going to have to let them go.”

“They might have data that proves important – ”

“Maybe they would. Most likely they wouldn’t. And whatever you can find out from them, I doubt that they can tell us anything that’s going to be important in the next three and a half years, especially since we don’t exactly have the resources to go waking more people up. For now, we need those medical systems to concentrate on our existing crew; when we get to Hylara I have no doubt that you’ll have as many failed revivals to study as you want.”

“… Yes, captain.”

The Friend returns with a space suit helmet, which it hands to Captain Klees for the radio, and everyone gets to work. I’m immediately hustled back to the medbay, of course, but at least I have jobs to do rather than stare at the ceiling. First: specify what should be salvaged from Greenhouse Ring 2. Second: schedule psychology sessions for everyone.

Psychology sessions, for a crew grieving fresh deaths and facing a future more hopeless and uncertain than it’s ever been, given the state of the ship. I’m not looking forward to it. I’m not a psychologist! Lina will take some of the patients, but she’s not a psychologist either! Our crew doesn’t have a psychologist. Our psychologist is dead, throat cut just a few rings away by a Public Universal Friend.

And even Renn hadn’t been a psychologist, really. He could do the job a hell of a lot better than me, but he’d been a behavioural scientist, hadn’t he? The last qualified psychologist on the ship had been Keiko Kinoshita, the conspirator who’d masterminded the on-ship part of the conspiracy that had driven Reimann to his death and broken the ship in the first place. And she’d been more of an AI specialist.

Yeah, this ship was a super good idea. Masterful selection. Ten out of ten.

I get up from the medbay computer and have a bit of a stretch. I know it’s my imagination, but it’s like I can feel the artificial blood in my veins, freer in my muscles than real blood weighed down by silly things like cells. (Impossible, of course.) I wonder how long my blood will take to replace it. A couple of days?

Fatigue and hopelessness roll under me like a wave under the roots and I force myself not to sink. Not yet. Too much is going on. Calmly, I designate the plants that I think should be moved from Greenhouse Ring 2. Calmly, I weigh up what to do with the bees (there won’t be nearly enough pollen and nectar in one greenhouse to support all the hives on the ship), and decide to move those, too, and supplement the hives with refined sugar – I foresee a stark drop in luxuries in the future and people will want the honey. Besides, we can always terminate hives later if we have to. Calmly, I try to look up at least some basic information on how to actually be a psychologist. Calmly, I wait for news that the ship is in one piece again, and that Denish and Tinera are safe and helping with the move (they are).

And then I let myself collapse into bed and pass out again.