<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Map] ………. Next> ………. Last>>
I wake up in my own bed, and for a moment it seems blatantly obvious that the recent confusing events were a strange nightmare.
Then I look down, and realise I’m still in my clothes. There are little aches all over my body, and when I move, pain wells up in my right hip, bringing with it the vivid memory of being slammed into the metal frame of a hospital bed by Heli. I don’t even have to look to know how deeply bruised it must be.
The most persistent ache is a particularly sharp pain on my right forearm. I take a look – the flesh has been neatly sliced open and professionally glued shut. It’s not a large incision. A surgery, not an injury.
It’s in the exact spot where my ID chip was injected into my bone.
Okay. Um. Not a dream. I’m in my bed in Habitation Ring 2, injuries treated; the convicts are in charge and it’s logical to assume that they locked us up in our habitation ring. And they took my ID chip out, for… some reason.
That’s… really ominous, actually. I can’t think of any positive reasons to remove someone’s ID chip. I stare at my arm, no more sure of what’s going on than I was before, except this time instead of my friends being at the mercy of someone trying to kill them, I’m at the mercy of said friends who probably think I tried to kill them.
It’s tempting to just stare at the ceiling of my little room until whatever’s going on settles down into a sensible scenario, but I summon the willpower to drag myself out of bed, grit my teeth at the dozen new surprise aches that come with the movement, and head out. Captain Sands – Keldin, I suppose he isn’t the captain any more – sits on an empty flower pot next to an unoccupied room. He has a black eye, and his face is littered with little plasters where Sunset’s nails scratched particularly deep. He eyes me warily.
“Hey,” I say, for lack of anything better to say.
“Hello, Aspen.”
“Are you alright?”
“Do you care?”
“Not particularly. But I don’t think fighting is going to help either of us right now.” I sit on a flowerpot of my own.
Keldin heaves a sigh. “Well, we both appear to be alive. For now.”
“They’re not going to kill us.”
“Your faith in these people is baffling.”
“I’m sorry, but you’re the one who just tried to – ” I cut myself off. Fighting with this vindictive piece of shit isn’t useful right now. “Look. They had us unconscious, right? Long enough to treat our injuries, and perform surgery.” I tap my forearm. “If they wanted us dead, we’d already be dead.”
Keldin nods and gets up. “We should do a head count. Make sure everyone’s here.”
Sunset comes around the corner. Her hand is in a brace; I wonder if she rebroke those fingers attacking Keldin. Whatever happened, if the damage was too messy for bone cement alone, that’s not good news. “Oh,” she says. “There you two are.” She calls over her shoulder. “They’re both here! They look fine!”
“So everyone is here, then?” Keldin asks.
Sunset glares at him a moment, and addresses me instead. “All six of us are here. What do you think they’ll do to us?”
I open my mouth to respond, but we’re interrupted by the sound of an airlock opening. We rush over to see Tinera. She’s still wielding a power tool like a gun, but she’s not pointing it at anybody this time, so. Improvement.
She looks us all over impassively. “Aspen. Come with me, please.”
I go with her.
She leads me into the next ring, Storage Ring 2. As soon as we’re through the airlock and alone, she asks, “Are you alright? Did they hurt you?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Just bruised up a bit. Never mind me; he tried to kill you! Are you all alright? How did you survive? What’s going on?”
“We were rather hoping that you could tell us what’s going on,” Adin says, walking into view from behind a large crate. Tal strolls behind him. “We didn’t want to leave you in there with them like that, but with no idea who was involved in trying to kill us and what exactly is going on, we just thought it best to grab everyone and try to sort this out after.”
“It was just Keldin,” I say. “By the time the rest of us realised what he was doing, he’d password-locked the door locks and atmospheric command, and there was nothing we could do. We tried to force him physically, but Heli protected him.”
“Makes sense that she’d want us dead,” Adin growls.
I shake my head. “I think she’s just really mercenary. She knew that none of us would ever forgive her crimes, but seemed to think that if she supported Keldin, he’d find her useful and forgive her. Which is stupid, but I guess she was desperate. He was going to lock us up and build a new crew of loyal colonists. Or at least try to. I have no idea how he thought he could pull that off, but he’s always been an overconfident, stubborn fucker. Without him in charge, I don’t think Heli’s a danger to any of you.” I glance at Tinera. “So, I suppose congratulations on your promotion are in order, Captain Li Null?”
“Me?” Tinera laughs. “Are you kidding? I’d drive this ship directly into a star within a week.”
“We’re not within a week’s journey of any stars,” Tal points out.
“Whatever. We voted on a new captain, and I sure as shit didn’t win.”
“Then who…?”
She gestures to Adin, who gives me a shy smile.
“Ah. Captain Klees.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Too bad, it’s protocol. I don’t suppose any of you guys know what the fuck happened here? A custom alarm went off, and then Keldin’s suddenly trying to kill everyone out of nowhere?”
“Ah, yeah.” Tal grins. “The Heartbreak Screamers. Genius, right?”
“No, they’re terrible. What was that alarm even for?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Ke taps kes chest. “Heartbreak Screamers? Alarms for kill switches in our hearts? Come on.”
“That alarm went off,” Captain Klees explains, “because somebody tried to send the kill codes to the Public Universal Friend’s heart.”
Well, at least this is proof positive that we had indeed managed to deactivate the kill switches. “Keldin wanted to murder the Friend? Why?”
“Probably because it knew about the murders,” the captain shrugs. “My guess is, he thought he could discreetly kill it while it was on its way to our habitation ring and make it look like its heart had failed as a result of its mysterious medical condition. But when that didn’t work and the alarm went off, he panicked. The Friend ran straight to us, and it was a couple of rings away by that point, it’s not like he could’ve stopped it. So he went into damage control mode. Would be my guess. Locked it in with us and decided to wipe the slate clean. Probably planned to pass it off as a deadly computer glitch, but you guys caught him and he had to scramble for an excuse.”
I frown. Trying to kill one person for frivolous cover-up reasons, triggering an alarm, then trying to cover up that crime by killing a whole bunch of people you can make a justifiable excuse for? That’s fucked up. “What information could our Friend have that could possibly make him try to kill it? If you tell me that Keldin was somehow the mastermind behind stabbing Renn and the other Friend then I – ”
“Oh, no! Keldin hasn’t tried to hurt anyone up until this thing, so far as I know. The one who killed Renn is the Public Universal Friend.”
“That… can’t be right. The Friend didn’t even know that the victims were drugged, how – ?”
“Not that Friend,” Tinera says. “The dead one.”
“The… what?”
“Apparently,” Tinera says, “our Public Universal Friend, the living one, was approached by the new Friend, the dead one, who requested a fatal dose of something that could kill quietly. Now, I’d think that when someone comes up to you like ‘hey give me a suicidal dose of poison’, a responsible doctor would refer the patient to a psychologist, but you know what Friends are like. Our Friend apparently thought that this was a reasonable request and just handed over its favourite killing drug.” She wrinkles her nose. “See, this is why giving yourself brain damage to alter your own behaviour is a terrible idea. Anyway, our Friend clearly thought that the dead Friend intended to commit suicide. There’s no way it would’ve supplied the drugs to kill someone else. And the other Friend apparently wasn’t aware that a ‘fatal dose’ for a teeny tiny person is quite different to a ‘fatal dose’ for someone really tall like Renn. So…”
“The Friend tried to kill Renn by poisoning his wine while helping him do the translations,” I say quietly, putting the pieces together. “But the drugs that could kill the Friend aren’t enough to kill Renn. And Renn must’ve been a better psychologist than the Friend was an actor, because at some point he caught on and slipped the Friend the poison, too. Probably mixed together the wine in their glasses or something, I don’t know. The Friend finished the job with a knife, but as it fled the scene, Renn must’ve grabbed the knife and…”
“He was dying,” Captain Klees says. “They say that in moments of desperation, people sometimes show surprising strength. It was an astoundingly lucky shot, or unlucky shot, you might say; had he missed the heart by just a little, the Friend probably would have lived. Knife plugging the wound and all that. But heart muscles, of course, move, it bled into its lungs, and collapsed just before reaching the airlock. The collapse jarred the knife, causing the blood to leak out, and…” he shrugs.
“So no blood trail,” I muse. “It was stabbed at Renn’s computer terminal, not near the door. And Keldin was staking everything on finding this murderer. He’d locked all of you up and justified so many rash decisions with the investigation, and everyone was unhappy with it, and he just needed to be able to prove that Lina did it and execute her. So when the Friend told him, and then headed off to tell all of you…”
“Using the kill codes to let it die of a ‘heart attack’ due to its mysterious illness made sense,” Captain Klees finishes, nodding. “Get that out of the way with no reason to suspect it was murder, convict and execute Lina with everyone else probably believing she was guilty, free us and have the space and time to figure out how to deal properly with Heli, pull things back to normal. Until the Friend didn’t die, and Tal’s alarm went off, and the Friend reached our ring, and from that point Tal and everyone in our ring would know that he’d just tried to kill two people to frame one of them for murder.”
“So he panicked,” I say quietly. “And apparently decided that the best way to try to save his own skin was mass murder under the guise of justice. What a rot. I can’t believe any of use ever trusted him in any capacity.” I look down at my own hands. My gaze catches on the glued skin on my forearm. “Why take our ID chips out, though?”
“Oh, that was my idea,” Tal chimes in. “It’s just to lock the doors so none of you guys can get out of HR1 without us. Sands’ door locking method was stupid; he had me show him how to make the airlocks lock if Tinera gets too close to them, to keep her in HR2, right? Then just copied the same thing for the rest of us. But you know how the AI determines where you are?” Ke taps a small bandage on kes forearm, then winces.
“You fooled the lock by removing your ID chips,” I say.
“Yep,” Tinera says. “We had some repair tools in there from fixing things up while everyone was getting ready to change rings. When it was clear that Keldin was trying to kill us, the doctors just cut our chips out and we walked out.”
“Obviously,” Tal says, “we weren’t going to let Sands fool the locks so easily, so we did the opposite. We put our chips back in and coded the HR1 locks the other way, so they’re locked by default and only open if one of us is nearby. It means that in theory someone could go through the door by taking one of us hostage, but other than that it – ” Ke stops talking, staring at my arm.
“What?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”
Ke glances at kes own arm, then back to mine. “N-nothing. I just… wow. I think I’m very stupid. Can it really be that easy?”
<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Map] ………. Next> ………. Last>>
Derin Edala 
So, Tal’s going to review alll of Capt. Reimann’s alterations now, isn’t ke? Probably devise a sort of plug-in device to change ke’s active ID chip and read every dead astronauts diary entries too, while ke’s at it. I picture something like William Gibson’s micro-softs, except on the arm and not behind the ear. Tal’d love the reference, I bet. I look forward to what ke’ll find.
Also, please give the other crew members their chips back. Except for Keldin and maybe Heli, for being a danger to the crew. Or give them the chips back, too, but track them better? Something like that.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think Keldin and Heli should have their ID chip privilege removed, yeah. Speaking of people it’s dangerous to have around…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Tal has!!! Access to Reimann’s ID chip!!!!
Can Heli be dropped into space yet? Without a suit?
LikeLike
Hate her all you want, but murder is bad, actually, even if the victim is a despicable person.
Also, why only her and not Keldin? He did try to kill six (6!!!) people because he – what? Couldn’t admit that he’d falsely accused Lina and confined all of them? Like, nobody expected him to be a futuristic mix of Sherlock Holmes and Jane Marple? Not knowing instantly whodunnit is not a flaw, actually.
Heli didn’t try to kill anybody, at least.
LikeLiked by 1 person
IS TAL TALKING ABOUT TALKING TO THE AI???
Im so glad to hear all our crew are okay, and it seems that theyre working well together still!!! I really think they should pull the NON-mutinous murder crazy “new” crew mates out from Heli and Keldin, because… Yeah, theres new divisions and its no longer old crew and new crew, and I dont like the idea of Heli and Keldin having access to more people right now.
Ugh its so gross that he used the kill codes, I mean it was all there for evidence to it and his attitude towards prisoners, but…
THIS DOESNT ANSWER WHY NON DOCTOR PUF WANTED TO KILL RENN? At least not concretely. Why did it decide Renn being out of the picture was the best idea? Did Doctor!PUF really not know? Im… not trustworthy of that fact, but Im fine with it as a cover. Bc I trust the DoctorPUF fhdksks but still.
LikeLiked by 2 people
My only guess is “the lobotomy thing”.
LikeLike
i think something renn had said or done made PUF think he had serious intent to lyson procedure people after landing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, he seemed to think Lyson operations were good even for people who don’t want them or at least can’t meaningfully consent. But that alone wouldn’t do it, would it? There’s nobody there to lobotomise and if there were, it’s rather doubtful that any of the doctors would a) be qualified to do so and b) actually consent to undertake the operation. The danger is as theoretical as Lina stealing organs.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think it could’ve had something to do with whatever secret things Renn was working on besides the translation, or perhaps the translation itself. After all, Sands was recruited by his government to be here, who’s to say Renn wasn’t as well?
LikeLike
If they’d figured this out earlier they maybe could have avoided the situation with cr1. oh well
LikeLike
I don’t think they had access to Reimann’s arm before then? The whole CR1 incident was how they got Tal and access to the front, which is where Reimann’s arm was.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Okay, so I was right that the murders were self-contained, but I’ve no idea why the Friend would want to kill Renn. Unless the Renn was planning to perform Lyson experiments on the prison slaves and the Friend killed him to prevent it. Consent is key and a that.
So they’re clearly gonna swap around ID chips to trick the computer, but who’s chips are getting swapped and why?
LikeLiked by 1 person
It sounds like someone is going to use the old captians chip to gain access to some or all of his files and clearances.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That doesn’t sound like a good enough reason to kill him now. There’s a) nobody to Lyson-ize right now b) the doctors probably can’t do it (brain surgery is notoriously difficult and nobodies’ specialty) and c) probably would refuse if told to.
So, why kill Renn?
Then again, dead!PUF might be like Sands and act rashly and without careful thought. PUF or not, it was still a human and those make bad decisions sometimes.
LikeLike
Obsessed with this story now. I suppose they could have gotten into CR1 that way too? I think it would be possible to fake someone’s ID by putting in their chip, possibly? So they could spoof being Kinoshita or Reimann, though i doubt that would get past passwords. However they could probably access private logs that way. The AI has limited voice/visual recognition so it might not be able to tell the difference, unless it can logic enough to know Reimann/Kinoshita cant come back from the dead. The other conclusion you could draw is that that’s how the AI picks victims, colonists arent tracked as crew til they register so, but every single colonist has an ID chip. Theres nothing saying they arent being tracked as well. There must be a list of people that are protected from the AI, since the experimenters wouldn’t want to be taken over themselves.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t know. You would think that the first crew would be protected then, but some of them are not since one of them was taken by the AI. The important people are stashed in CR3, and we don’t know if there were plans to get more rings besides 1 and 5. Maybe CR3 was supposed to be the only one spared.
LikeLike
Well that’s a simple fix for the kill switch implants in the rest of the population! They’re targeted via the ID system. Remove or nuke the ID chips and the kill switch can’t be targeted. And the ID chips aren’t hardened in any way, you can pop them out in like three minutes, so surgical removal scales to large groups.
LikeLike
That would be easy, yeah. If that’s how it works.
LikeLike
CAPTAIN KLEES LET’S FUCKING GOOO
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh my god I’m so relieved that they’re not mad at Aspen. Somehow, that was the thing I was dreading the most. Congratulations to Adin for the promotion!! Keldin is going to fucking HATE taking orders from him!
Also WOW. I can’t believe the murder was that simple?? Truly incredible. I wonder why the dead Friend decided to kill Renn? I thought their political views were in alignment… Did Sunset manage to convince it that Lyson projects are bad, and so it decided to kill Renn for the good of the colony? What a MESS. PUBLIC UNIVERSAL FRIEND, I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU JUST GAVE THAT FRIEND A FATAL DOSE OF DRUGS WITH *NO QUESTIONS ASKED.* GOD.
And so my murder theory is COMPLETELY jossed, ha. Fair enough!
I can’t believe Keldin decided to kill the whole old crew for such a petty reason as *saving face…* He really is a fucking mess, god. He is NOT captain material!
I’m intrigued by Tal’s idea… is ke going to just switch chips around, so the AI thinks Adin is Keldin, for example?
LikeLiked by 2 people
I was thinking he was going to get into Reimann’s private files, and see if he did, in fact, leave a note about what the password is. (Tal asked if Reimann left a note with the password back when ke woke up. It’d be funny if it turned out he did all these chapters later!)
I bet it’s the name of whoever it was that he cared about in CR1.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, reading a persons diary or finding their favorite books is a likely way to make more educated guesses at their passwords, especially in a society where they’re probably not commonly used and thus less likely to be a pseudorandom string of characters.
LikeLike
WOOOOT did not see that coming!
👀 Are we about to see the answer to “how did Riemann get into HR1 without his arm/How did the AI know Riemann died in the ring when his arm was elsewhere”? 👀
LikeLike
right! they may not have the body but reimann’s arm is still on board!!
LikeLiked by 1 person
KELDIN SANDS YOU PATHETIC, SELF-SERVING – I was going to compare him to a sea slug or something but honestly there isnt a creature that wouldn’t be an insult to. They should feed him to the AI. Plug him back in and let Amy have him.
LikeLike
Grim as it is, I *think* what Tal is planning is to dig Reinman’s chip out of his corpse’s arm…
LikeLike
As someone who’s been mainlining this story over the past few days, I can’t wait to find out what happens next!
(Also, it’s been absolutely *chef’s kiss* so far. Extraordinary concept, extraordinary execution.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
So looking at the future chapter titles, we got DEFUSE, REVIVE, STABILISE, LOBOTOMY, TAL, and CAPTAIN.
Defuse will probably be either defusing the situation with the new crew now that they know only Heli and Keldin were bad, or about defusing the kill switches for everyone.
Revive (which for the longest time I thought was the last chapter when they made it to the planet) is going is maybe be about reviving someone, perhaps reviving convicts to remove their chips? Or waking up more people?
Not sure about the rest. Maybe LOBOTOMY is about the motivation to kill Renn? I am curious what they’re going to do to Keldin.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Man, I picked a good time to find this series. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d finished my binge and this chapter wasn’t up yet.
So, murder mystery solved, good.
Sands and Heli still need to be dealt with.
I hope Sunset, Sam, and Celi get to return to the crew.
Congrats, Captain Klees.
Ooh, are we gonna do a chip swap? Fool the AI
Now, with that out of the way; we know why the cranial ports are compromised, we know why the previous captain went axe crazy and how he was easily able to ID the brainjacked victims, we know why the separated crew never were able to reunite. What we still don’t know is what chemical they were synthesizing in Lab Ring 2 that ended up fatally poisoning 3 of them and required the whole ring be ejected; and, what killed off the crew in the front of the ship. Possibly the same thing? I feel like I remember from the CR1 fiasco an explanation about how the air was circulating through the whole ship, just that CR1’s vents were locked closed. And I get the feeling that whatever it was is the cause for medical Friend’s sickness here.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t think the mystery chemical is affecting Doctoor Friend since Aspen would probably get sick first (unless they’re already sick?) and Kinoshita didn’t get sick either.
But maybe that’d why the AI took so long to revive someone? They were waiting for something to clear out of the vents.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I keep thinking about this, and Keldin really picked the worst option out of all his choices didn’t he?
The murder was completely self contained and everyone alive was innocent? Best option is to free the suspects, go “sorry everyone, it turns out all of you were innocent. How about everyone gets two weeks off to process that two people we’ve worked closely with are now dead. Again, sorry about that.” Everyone does bonding activities, Keldin stays captain, and everything proceeds as before (and Heli is dealt with).
Even if the killing codes worked, Aspen, Celi, and Heli are all guaranteed to know about them. Celi is the doctor and, if Lina is executed, will become the only doctor. Ke will quickly be able to figure out that it was the kill switch, and Aspen was there for Doctor Friend’s confession, so they will know that it couldn’t have been it. There’s no way Keldin could justify using the kill switch, and things would still quickly unravel as the news spread to the rest of the crew.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Why is Adin the captain?
I’m mostly just confused by this because he hasn’t played a notable role, and hasn’t seemed to handle stress that well.
> Anyway, our Friend clearly thought that the dead Friend intended to commit suicide. There’s no way it would’ve supplied the drugs to kill someone else.
Lol. Depends on how shared their ideology is, but that totally sounds like something they’d do.
Kinda sad that we just.. dropped Sands? It felt like we kept seeing bits and pieces of character development from him, without Aspen really trying to improve him, and then decides to go crazy suddenly? Felt weak.
LikeLike
oh damn! they DID take each other out… logically that made a certain amount of sense but motive wise…. guess we’ll have to wait for more details to come to light. UGH you’re so good at peeling back each layer so agonizingly slow! i’m completely hooked.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, wow. I actually called it from the beginning, except backwards. I guessed that Renn killed the Friend, then killed himself. It would at least make physical sense that way, although I was guessing based purely on tropes and not anything diegetic.
Gotta say, I’m very disappointed in this outcome, if it is a presented. It is so wildly improbable that it shatters my suspension of disbelief. Still, maybe there’s something I’ve missed that will make it all plausible again. I’ll certainly keep reading because it’s a great story.
Onwards!
LikeLike
Once again, I think Aspen is way too fucking rational and calm about all of this. Me? Tinera starts talking friendly to me when we leave the habitat ring, I’d have been like “fuck you tinera, shove it up your ass”. Fucking drug me and threaten me and shit, fuck you all the way.
Maybe I’m just an angry person.
LikeLike
Never a dull day on this perfectly normal spaceship!
LikeLike
good lord. well, at least everyone’s clear on who was with keldin and who tried to stop him, and there generally seem to be no hard feelings between aspen and their friends. I’m still a little shocked that keldin resorted to mass murder (even if only of people he deemed subhuman) just to save face for his own fuckup. clearly, he was some kind of intelligence agent before he was sent on this mission. what else did the friend tell him that could’ve freaked him out so badly?
LikeLike