096: REVIVE

I wake up in a bright room, littered with IVs and monitoring equipment and with an oxygen mask on my face. I carefully reach back to disconnect the cerebral stimulator from the port in my skull.

But there’s no stimulator there, just a slight bump where my skin has grown over the port, and after a moment of sheer, panicked confusion, I remember that I’m not waking up from chronostasis. That was ages ago. I’m…

“Aspen!” Lina’s face comes into view, a bit blurry and unnervingly close. I’m in the medbay. Obviously. “Aspen, are you alright? How are you feeling?” She turns away and raises her voice briefly. “Everyone! Aspen’s awake!”

I glance around. I’m in the medbay in RAMR1 (I can tell because the computer terminal monitor looks to be intact), and I’m not actually covered in all that much medical equipment; aside from the oxygen mask, there’s a pulse and oxygen monitor on my finger, and an IV in each arm. The one on my right contains bright orange synthetic blood, which… isn’t great. What happened to me that made me need an emergency influx of blood?

I glance at the line coming out of my left arm, which is even more alarming. This one appears to be full of normally coloured blood, and it takes me a few seconds to realise that it’s not being fed into me; that’s my blood being drained out of my body. What could’ve happened to me that necessitates replacing my blood?

“Aspen,” Lina says, pulling the mask from my face (I let her), “do you know what day it is?”

“No,” I mumble, “but that doesn’t mean anything, I never know what day it is.”

“Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?”

“I’m in the medbay, and you’re Lina Chisolm. You guys just staged a coup against our wannabe-mass-murderer rootrotting ex-captain.”

“Good,” she breathes, relieved. “That’s good. I need you to follow my finger with your eyes, alright?”

“What happened?” I ask, watching her finger move around.

“Your life just got saved by the DIVR-32 geneset, is what happened,” comes Tinera’s voice from the doorway. “Nine minute anoxic time limit before serious brain damage is a risk. Are you alright?”

“Anoxic?” I mumble, frowning at the bag of synthetic blood. “I was suffocating?”

“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” Lina says.

I try to get up. “The others!”

Lina pushes me gently back down. “Rest. Just because you can carry enough oxygen to be conscious doesn’t mean you should be walking around.”

“The others,” I insist, but I don’t try to sit up again.

The room is filling up with crewmates. Captain Klees steps forward. “Sam was with us,” he says gently, glancing at Sam standing beside him. “But everyone else in Habitation Ring 1… I’m sorry to say that you were the only survivor.”

I glance over the faces crowding the room. Lina, still trying to take my vitals; the Friend messing with medical equipment. Tinera and Denish and Sam and Captain Klees, watching be with tense concern; Tal, in the doorway, tears streaking through kes mascara. Ke meets my eye for a brief moment, then turns and runs out of the room.

“Everyone else is dead?” I ask.

“Everyone else is dead,” Captain Klees confirms.

“How? How could that happen? Who flooded the ring with carbon monoxide?!”

“Nobody, so far as we know,” Captain Klees says. “There will, of course, be a full investigation; this can’t possibly be a coincidence. All we know is that when we took Sam back to the ring, we found everyone collapsed onto the floor. We got everyone to the medbays as quickly as we could, but…”

“It was too late,” I finish. A non-DIVR doesn’t survive without oxygen for very long.

“Yes,” Captain Klees says. “Now that we know you’re alright, I’ll launch a full investigation into what exactly went wrong here.” The gaze that he sweeps across every face in the room isn’t quite an accusatory glare, but it’s close. “Lina, how long until Aspen can be up and about?”

“Probably five days to return to full duty, if there’s no organ damage,” Lina says. “Technically they could get up after we’ve finished this transfusion, but I’m not entirely happy with somebody walking around with that much synthetic blood. Five days to heal up the platelets and white cells and soforth, and they should be alright. They can go on light duty – and I mean light duty – after twenty four hours, if you really need them. Longer if there’s organ damage, which I’ll start scanning for now.”

“Excellent. Everyone who’s not a doctor, or a patient, clear the room.” Captain Klees gives me a little smile. “I’m glad you’re okay, Aspen.”

I just nod back numbly. It still doesn’t… Captain Sands tried to kill the convicts by decompressing their ring, how did… how did it go this way? Captain Klees is right; it couldn’t possibly be a coincidence, but who would do such a thing? And how can four more of my crewmates be dead? Just like that?

Well,I think hollowly, morbidly. At least I don’t have to make peace with Keldin now.

I sit through some cognitive tests and reflex tests and the doctors briefly debate whether they need to do an MRI and decide against it. Lina goes off to do some tests on blood samples she took back when my bloodstream was rather less synthetic, while the Friend takes my temperature and records my oxygen levels.

“Can I see them?” I ask it.

“The dead?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re laid out in the other medbay. It’s not a good idea to go walking around alone right now, but after these tests are complete, this Friend will take you there.”

“Thanks. Hey, did you really give the other Friend antidrenomate to commit suicide with?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Why?”

It shrugs. “It seemed that that Friend had determined that the ship was better off with it dead. This Friend wasn’t about to second guess its calculations.”

“Would you give me a fatal dose of antidrenomate if I – ?”

“No, obviously not. You’re not a Friend.”

“Universal Friends are so fucking weird.”

A smile ghosts across its lips. “As this Friend has already been informed, multiple times. Look into this little light, please.”

“Didn’t we already do this test?” I ask, squinting into the light.

“No harm in double-checking.”

I don’t see the point – either my pupils will contract or they won’t, it’s not going to change – but I’m not a doctor.

“I suppose you wouldn’t have given it the drugs if you’d known what it was going to do with them.”

“If this Friend had known,” the Friend says firmly, putting the little torch down, “it would have given that Friend the drugs, and made certain that that Friend took them, whether it wanted to or not.”

“You would’ve killed it?”

“Rather than allow it to murder Renn Sunn? Yes. The Public Universal Friends do not tolerate that kind of behaviour within our ranks.”

“You don’t kill non-Friends? But didn’t you kill a whole bunch of people?”

“Friends do kill when necessary. Pacifism is incompatible with strict utilitarianism. If this Friend was protecting five children from a gunman, and the best way to protect them was to kill the gunman, and this Friend was able to do so and refused to do so because it didn’t want to have to kill, then that would be an evil and selfish decision. But there are limits. Friends cannot wantonly use force or violence or coercion to improve the world, for the same reason that we cannot be leaders. Imagine what that would be like, a world where a sizeable, united utilitarian force could go about taking any measure it deemed necessary for the greater good of humanity. Is that a world in which you would like to live?” The Friend shakes its head. “Had Renn been a direct threat to somebody, attempting to kill another crew member perhaps, then that Friend would have been permitted to kill him if that was necessary to stop him. But that Friend was not permitted to kill him for political reasons. That is never acceptable. Friends who take such actions must be culled from the ranks; they are too dangerous otherwise.”

“Political reasons?”

“It seems fairly obvious to this Friend that that Friend was concerned about Renn’s stance on Lyson projects. That Friend approached this Friend for the drugs almost immediately after Renn’s views came to light, and given that we are trafficking a prison population clearly chosen to be exploited and that several people seem to be using this colony as their personal science experiment anyway, it is not unreasonable to think that Renn might actually be allowed to perform such experiments under limited conditions on Hylara. Which would have been intolerable, obviously.”

“But that Friend was on Renn’s side! It said – ”

“And you believed it? Aspen, no Friend would ever be in support of such projects. The entire reason we have such strict entry standards and initiation rituals with centuries of immutable law and tradition behind them is that Lyson work is far too dangerous to be allowed outside of such strict parameters. We understand how dangerous it is. No Friend would ever support it, especially not in a situation like this. It was taking a false stance so it could have a better chance at Renn, this Friend believes.”

“Good news, Aspen,” Lina says, coming back into the room. “Your bloodwork’s clean! Except for the really high carbon monoxide levels, obviously. And I’ll have to do the bloodwork again once you’ve regenerated all of your blood, which will probably take eight to ten weeks. You’ll need iron supplements, obviously.”

I open my mouth to respond, but I’m cut off by yet another alarm.

“Oh, what is it this time?” Lina sighs, but I catch the Friend’s eye and see my own fear and anticipation written on its face. We know this alarm – it’s one we’ve heard before.

It’s the alarm for ejecting a ring from the ship.

I leap up out of bed, carelessly pulling out my IVs, as Captain Klees barrels into the room.

“Captain, what are you – ?”

“It’s not me!” he insists, heading for the medbay terminal.

“It has to be, only the captain has clearance!”

“What’s going on?” Lina asks, but nobody answers her. We all crowd around the terminal. Captain Klees types.

Cancel ring ejection

- You do not have the authorisation to do that. -

I’m the captain

- You do not have the authorisation to do that. -

“Aspen,” Captain Klees says desperately. “Try.”

“But I’m not the – ”

“Try!”

I shrug and take over.

Cancel ring ejection

- You do not have the authorisation to do that. -

Which ring is being ejected?

- Chronostasis Ring 5 is being ejected. 9 seconds remain to cancel the ejection. -

Cancel ring ejection

- You do not have the authorisation to do that. -

Who authorised the ring ejection?

- Ejection of Chronostasis Ring 5 was authorised by Captain Joshua Reimann. -

I stare at the screen. I stare at my crewmates. They look as dumbfounded as I feel.

“What,” I ask, “the fuck?”

And then the floor shakes below our feet as Chronostasis Ring 5 begins to disengage.