097: STABILISE

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I’m still at the keyboard, so Captain Klees turns to me. “Where is everyone? Is anyone in CR5?”

I check. “Nobody’s in CR5. Well, except all the chronostatic colonists, I guess. Denish and Tinera are in HR2 on the other side of CR5, and seem to be staying put. Everyone else is on our side, and most of them are coming this way. Probably to ask you why you’re ejecting the ring.”

“Most of them?”

“Tal is close by in NAER1, but looks to be staying put.”

Captain Klees takes a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay. I should stay put to answer everyone’s questions. Lina, Aspen, go and see what’s up with Tal. Friend, monitor Denish and Tinera’s positions and let me know if they do anything stupid.”

“I should go alone,” Lina says. “Aspen should rest – ”

“I can walk a couple of rings down the ship just fine,” I insist, and head for Network and Engineering Ring 1. I manage to walk pretty confidently, until I enter the ring and the floor starts shaking again. Then the oxygen alarm goes off.

It’s quickly joined by the low power alarm. But then that cuts out, to be replaced by multiple other alarms I don’t recognise, partly due to lack of training but mostly because they’re all playing over the top of each other. I press my hands to my ears and look for Tal.

Ke’s not hard to find. Ke’s at kes favourite terminal, all decked out with random home made zeelite junk, most of which has fallen to the floor. Tears stream freely down kes face, and ke occasionally stops typing very briefly to brush them away enough to see the screen. Other than that, there’s little pause in the rattling of keys. Blood drips slowly but steadily onto the desk and floor, splattering random knicknacks, from a wound on kes forearm. Not the ID chip incision on the right arm, which has been glued together so neatly that the cut isn’t even visible, but from a messy, inexpert slash across the left. The cut doesn’t look dangerous (to my totally untrained eyes), but kes typing keeps reopening it until the blood soaks kes arm. Tal is paying no attention whatsoever to the blaring alarms, typing relentlessly despite the silent sobs shaking kes shoulders.

“Hey! Tal!” I call, as Lina rushes to another terminal to shut off the alarms. Ke doesn’t seem to hear me. As near-silence floods the room, broken only by typing and objects shaking with the trembling floor, I try again. “Tal!”

Nothing.

Lina puts a gentle hand on Tal’s shoulder. Tal doesn’t look up, and keeps typing at the same breakneck speed. She withdraws.

“Ke seems busy. We should try again later – ”

“Fuck that.” I step forward and put a hand over Tal’s eyes. “Hey! Tal! What the fuck are you doing?”

Tal swears in Texan, shoves my hand away, and keeps typing.

“Hey! Answer me!”

“I’m busy!”

“Oh, you’re busy, huh?” I grab kes arm and block the screen with my other hand. “Care to explain – ?”

The floor lurches sideways under my feet, knocking me to the ground and dragging Tal out of kes chair and on top of me. Lina stumbles but keeps her footing as a new alarm starts blaring. I wait for things to right themselves, but they don’t – the floor keeps moving sideways, and everything starts to get heavier.

DIVRs, like me, are usually pretty good with things like pressure changes. But you know what’s not good at pressure changes? Synthetic blood. It’s not great for sudden changes to blood pressure or circulation, which is why the doctors didn’t want me walking around. And I’m quickly learning that one of those things it’s not good at dealing with is changes to gravity. Flat on the floor, I gasp for air and struggle not to black out while Tal drags kemself off me and up the side of kes chair. With some hurried typing, the floor stops dragging me one way and starts sliding the other way, throwing me into the side of Tal’s desk. My heavily bruised hip manages to slam into it straight on, of course.

Becoming lighter feels even worse than becoming heavier, and with effort, I roll onto my stomach, in case I need to throw up. Things still feel wonky, even as the floor stops moving (or, well, the rotation stops increasing or decreasing – it’s technically always moving, I suppose). I briefly ponder trying to get up, but I’d probably just fall down again and hurt myself.

Tal’s entire focus is back on the terminal, and I figure that if distracting kem is going to fuck with the gravity again I should let it stay there. Lina presses her fingers to my neck, seeking a pulse.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” I insist, although things definitely still feel wonky. I even out my breathing and tilt my neck to give her better access to my pulse. The latest alarm still blares through the ring, but at least its not an incoherent cacophony of multiple alarms. Or a comically inappropriate TechDream song. So, it could be worse. I drag myself up onto my elbows. “Fucking Tal.”

“What did Tal do? What’s going on?”

The giddiness won’t pass; the floor is refusing to stabilise. I sit up and rest against the nearest partition. “What didn’t ke do? Just ejected a thousand of our colonists into space, for one thing.”

“But the computer said…”

“That a captain that’s been dead for years did it? Reimann’s body is long gone, from the time I injected a thousand of our colonists into space.” I gesture up, vaguely, towards Tal. A drip of blood drops from kes desk onto my foot. “You lot have been fucking around with ID chips to trick the computer, and suddenly a dead captain is up and authorising ring ejections? Don’t be stupid.” I raise my voice. “Hey, Tal! Did you kill our crewmates in Habitation Ring 1? Did you try to kill me today?”

There is, of course, no response. Just more typing.

“Tal wouldn’t!”

“Y’know, I would’ve thought so, too. And you’d think, that being a world-famous sociologist and all that, I’d at least be half-decent at predicting the behaviour of my crewmates, right? My friends? But somebody just tried to suffocate me, and succeeded in suffocating four people, probably in revenge since our previous captain whoseemed like a reasonable guy tried to murder you and the Friend to make himself look competent, and then tried to kill our other friends along with you to cover it up. And all that happened because another Friend, y’know, the people who are supposed to be all ‘humanity first’, the people who are supposed to be safe, decided to murder our psychologist for having bad politics, and I still can’t get over the fact that our psychologist, whom I also trusted, was into Lyson projects in the first place, so y’know what? I don’t know what Tal would or wouldn’t do. All I know is that our computer guy seems to have switched off basically every life support system we have, judging by those alarms, and is currently fucking with the gravity and throwing a quarter of our colonists away into space using stolen credentials and that almost half our crew are fucking dead. Maybe ke did kill them. I don’t know.”

“Tal wouldn’t.”

I blink sleepily up at her from my position sitting on the floor. “Why are you here?”

“Because you shouldn’t be out of bed at all, let alone without supervis – ”

“Why are you on this ship? Keldin said you were an illegal organ harvester.”

Lina doesn’t answer, but her expression tells me what I need to know. It’s not a lie.

I narrow my eyes. “He said that you took organs from your patients. That they’d die suspiciously soon in the treatm – ”

“We agreed,” Lina says sharply, “that what we did on Earth doesn’t matter. That was your rule, Aspen.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not captain any more. Does Captain Klees know what you did?”

“It doesn’t matter, and I’m not having this conversation with you. Come on. It’s a bad idea to distract Tal, so we should get you back to bed.”

She offers me her hand. I take it, and pull myself unsteadily to me feet. Everything feels pretty normal, except…

“Ugh, the room still feels tilted,” I grumble.

Lina grimaces. “It is tilted.”

“It… what?”

She shrugs. “The slope is off. Normally walking towards the front of the ship feels a bit like walking uphill, but right now the ‘hill’ is… a bit sideways. Which is really confusing, since the floor already slopes up to the sides because of the whole circle thing. That’s how I feel right now, anyway.”

Oh. Well, in that case, my sense of balance is perfectly accurate. It’s the spaceship that is wrong. Good to know.

I take a couple of steps forward, then the typing sounds stop. Tal rubs kes eyes, leans back from the computer, and spots us. “Oh. You’re still here.”

“Can you turn the alarm off?” Lina asks.

Ke does so with a few keystrokes.

“Did you kill our crewmates?” I ask.

“What? No!”

“Okay,” I say. “Good.”

“Hey,” Lina says, “Tal?”

“Mmm?”

“What the fuck is going on?”

“I just wrote a really cool autocorrecting program for the rotary thrusters. It’s not perfect, actually it’s pretty janky, but it should stop the ship from rotating to ten gs and killing us all or anything before the CR5 disengagement is finished. Once we’re clear of the ejected ring, rotation should be easy, but right now it’s a nightmare.”

I frown. I don’t remember any rotation difficulty when I was ejecting CR1.

“I meant more, you know, in general,” Lina said. “Are we going to die? And why is everything broken?”

“I don’t know if we’re going to die. Dying seems pretty popular lately.” Tal drags a hand across kes eyes to wipe away fresh tears.

“And everything being broken?”

“Amy’s dead.”

We stare at Tal. Tal stares back. I’m about to ask for more information when it hits me.

“Oh,” I say. “The AI doesn’t have any more stolen brains.”

Tal nods. “I didn’t think it would break everything this much. I mean, she’s still a ship AI; I assume she functioned perfectly fine before she started brain-stealing. But she’s done… something to her architecture? I don’t know. Something that made the brains load-bearing. Maybe this was part of the initial design, to make her more reliant on human brains over time; maybe that’s the only way the whole ‘thinking AI’ thing can work. Or maybe she shuffled stuff around fighting Reimann. Or maybe it’s just some stupid mistake. Whatever it is, she doesn’t work any more.”

“The AI is just… gone?” I ask. “Broken?”

“Broken, yeah. Gone, no. It’s much worse than that. There are pieces still active, calling up their programs, but they’re not talking to each other, meaning they’re probably going to do contradictory stuff and get us all killed. I’m killing as many as I can find before they kill us.”

“Can you… fix the AI?” Lina asks.

Tal snorts. “I’m not an AI tech. Even if I was, a ship’s AI isn’t something that one person can throw together on a terminal like this. These things take years, and massive teams, and I don’t know most of the details of how a normal AI works, let alone Amy. I can kill off any bits I find and replace them with simple individual programs. With time, I can link the programs to each other. But I can’t rebuild a proper AI, no.”

“Then why did you eject the brains of the one we have?!” I ask. “Call me a hypocrite if you want, but with CR1 I was saving Denish’s life! Why would you – ?”

“Because she killed my friends! I’ve been playing tag with this unreliable Frankenstein of an AI for a year and a half trying to find every possible danger in its completely wrecked code, trying to find anyway a bunch of dreaming zombies might take it into their heads to accidentally kill us, and I lost! No wonder Reimann locked Amy out of a bunch of her functions, because the instant she has any lead she murders Sunset and Celi! And she would’ve killed you, too! I killed her because I had to, and either the captain would’ve agreed with me, or the captain would’ve been wrong, so there was no sense in wasting any time and giving her a chance to kill someone else.”

“What’s a Frankenstein?” Lina asks.

“That’s not important,” I say. “The AI killed our crewmates? By itself?”

“Yeah.”

“So it was some error or loophole in the code, or…?”

“And the affected ring just happened to be the one with you guys in it? No way. This was deliberate. This was ‘trapping Reimann in CR1 to die’ deliberate.”

“But why?” Lina asks.

Tal looks back to the computer screen, but doesn’t start typing. Ke’s not working. Ke’s just avoiding our gaze.

“I think,” ke says quietly, “it’s because I told her to.”

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