068: RATE

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Captain Sands gestures his companions forward to explain. Sunset, eyes glittering, drops a stack of identical computer printouts on the table. We all take one.

“The chronostasis pods we sampled can be divided into three groups,” she explains. “The position where Rynn-Hatson died and what we learned in Denish and Aspen’s external inspection suggest that he died in the process of tampering with CR5. From where he was, we think he died right after installing a bacterial source after the tenth condenser out of twelve, leaving two condensers unaltered.”

“Wait,” one of the Public Universal Friends says. “Doesn’t that mean that over one hundred and sixty people in Chronostasis Ring 5 aren’t exposed to these bacteria, and presumably are safe from having their brains taken by the AI? Why wasn’t this hypothesis mentioned right away? They should be safe to revive, yes?”

“Yes,” Captain Sands says, “but the entire point of this exercise is to rescue people who are at risk from the AI. Those people are fine where they are. Go on, Sunset.”

“Right, so group A are twenty people from this presumably unaltered section of the ring. As you can see, this hypothesis is probably correct, as no luminescent bacteria were detected in their chronostasis fluid. If you check their nutrient, oxygen, and chronostasis fluid cycling, you can see that they’re all within expected levels for a chronostasis pod.

“Group B are twenty people from the ten per cent viability group. These people have definitely been exposed to the luminescent bacteria and have their cranial ports compromised, based on prior knowledge. Also, as you can see, their nutrient consumption, oxygen consumption and fluid cycling rates are far, far higher than group A.”

I raise my brows at the numbers. They are higher – like, eighty times higher. Then I frown at the luminosity readings. “Hang on. These all have positive readings, but some are far stronger than others. And there doesn’t appear to be any relationship between the luminosity reading and the nutrient consumption. If the bacteria are eating the colonist food, that doesn’t make sense.”

“They’re not eating the colonist food,” Captain Sands points out. “If they were, we wouldn’t see the same results in the oxygen cycling. There can’t be bacteria in the air tubes in that number; they’d starve.”

“The luminosity is dependent on the chronostasis fluid cycling,” Tal adds. “The faint ones are ones that cycled recently, see? The bacteria haven’t had time to repopulate again.”

I frown at the numbers. Wasn’t the whole point that Sands thought the bacteria were eating the colonists’ food? What’s going on?

“So Group A have low consumption and no tampering, group B have hijacked brains, tampering, and extremely high consumption. Group C are other people in Chronostasis Ring 5 – those exposed to the bacteria but outside the ten per cent group.”

I have a look at the group C figures. They all have luminescent bacteria detected, some more than others. Most have the nutrient, oxygen and fluid cycles within normal parameters. Some show the massively high ones.

“Okay,” Celi says, voicing my own thoughts, “so this suggests that we can probably use the heightened consumption as an indicator of who has a compromised cranial port, although we can’t be sure until we’ve revived some people. But we don’t know why.”

“Yes, we do,” Denish says. He sounds unhappy about it. “We know why the numbers are bigger. Is not the bacteria doing it.”

I glance at Captain Sands, Sunset, and Tal. They don’t say anything, but they don’t look surprised. They must have figured out why, too.

“We do?” Celi asks.

Denish nods. “Pods are taking more food, more oxygen, need cleaning more. All by the same amount – all about eighty times more. You see?”

“I don’t see why people would need – ”

“People do not. The chronostasis pods do. See?”

“Oh,” I say, as realisation hits. Eighty times – that’s how much a chronostasis field slows down time. “They’re not in chronostasis.”

“They’re not in chronostasis,” Captain Sands agrees, nodding.

“That might allow us to estimate a timeline,” I say thoughtfully. “It’s hard to tell the exact age of a stranger who’s been in a six-month coma, but none of the ones we tried to revive looked to be outside the age range for a colonist. We would’ve noticed something like that. I don’t remember specifically how old any of them were supposed to be, but everyone on this ship was between twenty three and forty when we took off.”

“We haven’t tried to revive very many,” Tinera points out. “We could’ve just gotten lucky with getting recent ones.”

“What about the ones that Reimann killed?” Tam asks. “We have that footage, right?”

“This Friend will review the footage later and try to age the colonists. We might not have noticed incongruent ages last time in the… excitement.”

“Can’t we get a timeline based on nutrient consumption?” Celi asks. “If we check all the pods and count up our compromised people, we can back-calculate how long their chronostasis fields have been off, right?”

“We can calculate the average,” Captain Sands agrees, “but I’m not sure how much that would really tell us. There are enough people outside the ten per cent group whose fields have been switched off that we can fairly conclusively say that Zale in the medbay isn’t an anomaly, and given that none of them were encountered during earlier revivals, I’m inclined to agree with the current hypothesis that they’re probably newly compromised. If they’re being compromised at a random rate, as they seem to be, we have no way of calculating how long it’s been going on because we don’t know how big the compromised population is at any given time. The chronostasis pods keep local ninety day records of nutrient and oxygen cycling independent of what our shady AI might not want to tell us, so if anyone’s been compromised within ninety days, we’d be able to find out, but that’s all we have. Anyway. The results here do seem to suggest that when the cranial port is compromised, the chronostasis field is turned off. It’s not proof, but I think it’s solid enough evidence that we can safely go ahead with the revivals.”

“You promised two weeks,” the doctor Friend says.

“We have enough data now to – ”

“You yourself said it isn’t certain. The more we know, the better.”

The captain sighs. “Alright. You can have the rest of the two weeks. But you’re putting colonist lives at risk by dawdling.”

I wouldn’t describe what we’d been doing as dawdling. We’ve made so much progress so quickly, I’m excited to see what else we learn in our remaining time!

We learn… nothing else useful, in our remaining time. Ah, well.

The day approaches, and it’s time to pick the extraction team. I decide to send Captain Sands in with both Public Universal Friends; a doctor, an engineer, and a set of helping hands. I have Renn coordinate the mission, since he seemed so put out by his rank being overlooked last time; I don’t know what his competence is like as a coordinator, but if anything does go wrong then I figure Captain Sands will probably take control from inside the ring, and Sands seems to have a pretty good head for this kind of thing.

Sands doesn’t ask for my input on which colonists to wake up this time. Maybe he’s already made up his mind. Or maybe he’s asking Renn, our current psychologist. Or maybe I’ve just burned up too much of his goodwill by now. Whatever.

And then, the night before the mission, just as everyone’s getting ready to go and get a good night’s sleep, something goes wrong.

“It’s liver failure,” Lina announces to a handful of us gathered in rec ring 2. “You know how we’ve been keeping an eye on Celi for post-chronostasis complications? Well, we have one.”

“Ke’s down a kidney and kes liver?” Sunset asks. “Is this going to keep happening?”

Lina shrugs. “Impossible to say. We’ve got kem on the best stabilisers we have, but there’s little we can do but see if kes body pulls back into balance or not. The liver tissue’s not necrotic, which is fantastic news, but it’s not doing its job, either. Celi’s also been gaining some fluid on the lungs which, I’m going to be honest with you, is a bad sign – if the cells in kes lung lining can’t stabilise their processes then that doesn’t say good things about more complicated organs.”

“In terms of this liver failure,” Captain Sands says, “what’s the best medical response?”

“One working kidney and no liver is a bad combination for blood filtration. Fortunately, we have filtration and dialysis equipment available, so it’s not a death sentence, provided nothing else goes wrong. Under most circumstances, I’d recommend regular mechanical dialysis until we get facilities set up on Hylara and a professional surgeon can do a proper organ transplant; that route puts Celi out of commission every now and then so far as work schedules go, but we have an oversupply of doctors for the crew size anyway. However, if kes body can’t stabilise, we’re going to get more failures, and if the heart or brain goes, there’s nothing I can do. And regular mechanical blood filtration, while much better than nothing, doesn’t promote the kind of stability we’re after. I think that stability is the most important factor here, meaning I have to recommend something drastic.”

“What do you recommend?”

“An immediate liver transplant.”

“Do we have the facilities for that?”

“To do the transplant? Yes. To do it under the best and safest possible conditions? No. We do have immune-blanked pipegrown replacements for all body organs that can be grown that way – which doesn’t include the kidney or the heart, by the way, which is why I’m so worried about further organ failures – in the cryofreezers. We do have two medbays with very advanced scanning equipment and with appropriate basic surgical equipment. We do not have a proper sterile surgery, meaning we’d have to make a field surgery, which is easy but not ideal. We don’t have a surgical robot to do the surgery for us, and we don’t, I have to stress, we don’t have an actual surgeon. Which is sort of a problem.”

Captain Sands rubs his chin. “You’re recommending that we wake a surgeon tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“If we did that, how long would it be until they’d recovered from chronostasis enough to perform a surgery?”

“At least a week.”

“Is it safe for Celi to leave this for a week?”

“Not really, no. But the alternative is to have a trauma doctor or an oncologist perform the operation. Which is doable, modern medicine makes this one of the simpler kinds of transplant, but it would still be far more doable in the hands of a real surgeon.”

“And a week is the best case scenario, right? It assumes out surgeon recovers properly from chronostasis. If they don’t, or if they die during revival, we’d have to find another, causing more delays.”

“Yes.”

“In your opinion, Dr Chisolm, what’s the greater risk? The time delay getting a surgeon, or the slightly lesser experience at this sort of thing that the two of you have?”

“Slightly… I’m an oncologist.”

“An oncologist with a rather good familiarity with organ transplants, according to your file. You do have a very broad skill set, Dr Chisolm.”

Lina crosses her arms. “Somebody who watches a lot of Plateuian space-tennis isn’t necessarily cut out to play it professionally. That’s what you’re asking me to do.”

“No, I’m asking you if you think you and the Friend doing this would be a bigger or lesser risk than waiting on a surgeon.”

Lina sighs. “Normally, I’d say to wait for the surgeon. But with Celi’s condition… I think time is more important.”

“Understood.” Captain Sands claps his hands together. “I’ll make the announcement that our revival plan is delayed until Celi has sufficiently recovered. This operation is our current highest priority and all crew members should be ready to prioritise whatever assistance the doctors ask of them. Sunset, hop on a computer and find Renn for me, I need to talk to him.”

Well then. At this rate, it’s starting to look like we’ll never get new crewmates.

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