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“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?”
“This Friend will 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.
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Derin Edala 
I’ve apparently completely lost track of things. Who’s on life support? Is that still people they tried to revive when Aspen was captain?
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Yes. They were basically the test subjects to see what differences there were between people taken by the AI and people who weren’t.
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Did Ami sound like GLaDOS by any chance?
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In my mind, she sounds like That tiktok voice.
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For a person who is totally calm, Aspen’s using “calmly, I (do this or that)” a bit too often. Also, I notice they’ve switched from calling Adin “Adin” to calling him “Captain Klees”. Same for Captain Sands before. What’s up with that? I notice they didn’t think of themself as “Captain Greaves” when they actually were the captain of the Courageous.
Also, Tal didn’t get to unburden kemself with the explanation why ke thinks ke told Amy to kill the people in Habitation Ring 1. I still would like to know how that happened. Ke doesn’t strike me as a cold blooded anything, nevermind a murderer, and besides, wasn’t Sunset ke’s best friend? Nobody kills their best friend just to get at someone. I mean, yes, Tal just effectively killed 1000 people. But that wasn’t murder, it was self defence and defence of the ship.
And Adin seems to be a rather competent captain! I love to see it. I’m unsure about his decision to not also keep Network an Engineering Ring 1, but since that’s right next to Greenhouse 1 they can remedy that without too much problems.
I wonder why Sam and Aspen react so strongly to the idea of always being reachable by radio (She says while laying in bed, shortly before 2 am, and typing this comment on her phone). Especially the fact that _all_ the convicts agree that it’s nbd, or even really good, makes me think it’s not a cultural thing. Tinera’s Lunari, Denish, Tal, Adin are Texan, the Friend is probably socialised in Arborea (for all it doesn’t have a nation, one’s upbringing imbues one with certain base assumptions about the world that are hard to shake, even with voluntary brain washing and surgery) and I don’t know where Lina is from. This doesn’t seem like a Texan mores vs. Everyone Else thing like the nudity taboo to me. It’s a convict vs. “free” people thing. What do they do in those prisons? What happened to make the convenience and occasional lifesaving utility of ubiquitous mobile phones lose favor with the not-imprisoned humans?
For that matter, why doesn’t anyone have or even desire some kind of personal computer / tablet / console thingy? Lying in bed and playing space tetris slaps in the future as much as the original does now, so why don’t they?
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In order:
1. YEP, Aspen’s clearly freaking out but trying to suppress it. Honestly kind of excited to see them go to therapy, even if it’s just mandatory counselling by a completely unqualified doctor.
2. Yeah, that struck me as weird too. I mean, the fact they never called themselves Captain Greaves makes sense, because Aspen spent their entire captaincy feeling like they were bad at their job and wishing there was somebody more qualified to do it, but the sudden swap from first name to last name is kind of strange.
3. My assumption, which is admittedly probably totally wrong, is that all Kel did was restore all of Amy’s functions. He gave her permission to do whatever she wanted, basically, and she immediately killed half the crew.
4. I think the author specified like 60 chapters ago that mobile devices aren’t really a thing anywhere anymore. Something about the negative affects of constant stimulation on the brain? (Which probably isn’t totally wrong, TBH.) I think it might just be a “society-marches-on” thing: it’s mentioned climate change caused a minor apocalypse sometime in the near-future from our POV, so maybe limited resources from that whole situation + research stating having your phone on you 24/7 is bad for your brain caused them to slowly fall out of favour. Meanwhile, IDK exactly what everybody did in prison, but it’s possible they were required to carry radios, or site leaders were? (I think the prisoners left in charge of other prisoners were called site leaders.) So the idea’s probably just less foreign to them than to Sam and Aspen.
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To 1) yes, I’m not sanguine about the “therapy” thing. I think there’s just an inherent conflict of interest when both patient and therapist are part of the same crew. Maybe some kind of group thing might help? Game Night is probably the most therapeutic and group building thing they can do, aside from just, you know, working together to stay alive and reach Hylara.
2) yes, Aspen struck me as the most future Australian in manners, by which I mean “What!? I should call the prime minister Sir!? I’m not trying to call him a pompous ass here, I’m trying to be respectful! What do you mean, that’s not what you express by calling someone by their first name?”
3)yeah, possibly.
4) oh,I forgot that. I did check back to see if captain!Aspen behaved like I remembered, though.
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Re: why Amy killed folks in Hab Ring 1, I have an inkling it might be an OLD order, from waaay further back in the story, that got backlogged at the time because it was locked out from climate control. But it stayed in the queue because nobody belayed that order, and since AI are still dumb machines, it went right back on it as soon as it got Clim controls back.
Like, if someone remembers or feels up to digging back, I think Tal might have tried to do something with Hab 1 and vents during a prior crisis.
And now ke feels Ultra Guilty because it came back to bite them all in the ass, unforseen, with deadly results 😥
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Is Aspen switching to “Captain” really weird? This guy who was just a crewmate (and previously, even subordinate) is now in charge. Mental adjustment to that comes with honorrific change. Sounds right.
I’d guess Tal told Amy something like “don’t let them fight” and she took a very strict interpretation of that.
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Yes, mentally calling Adin “Captain” is not exactly what I mean. I mean Aspen goes from pretty informal (calling everyone by their first names, except the Friend since it doesn’t have a name) to always (!) calling the person with the function of captain “Captain LastName” even in their internal narration and during movie/games night. It’s like they change from internally being a “hole-y t-shirt, ratty shorts and flipflops” guy (gender neutral) to “business formal only, must look Put Together at all times” just for the captain. As if The Captain was a Person Of Uppercase Letters in their mind, or something. Maybe they’re more of a hierarchy person than they appear at first sight? See also: it didn’t even occur to them to hold an election for captain even though they absolutely hated being one and thought they were bad at it. They knew and said so that the leadership ranking in the ship’s database was probably mostly bullshit, and yet.
I agree that that’s a probable version, but I was mostly going for: whatever Tal told Amy, ke’s probably absolutely wrecked with grief and guilt, and didn’t get to talk about it. Ke needs to scream and cry about the deaths for a while and be told that no, just because the evil ai took the first opportunity to get its murder on doesn’t mean that was Tal’s fault. It wasn’t ke’s intention, and not knowing what a novel entity comprised of dreaming hijacked brains and a computer program that’s too complicated to write on one’s own will do at all times is normal, actually.
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Horrible, I hate it.
Headcanon accepted.
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@Enai See, I just don’t think they were ever the first type of guy. Alden has the vibe of a polite intellectual in a ratty suit to me. This includes both being generally polite-informal to everyone else, and switching to a higher professional-polite-formal register with a recognized superior/boss. They strike me as very much an order sort of person, which includes hierarchy where appropriate.
Also, on a ship “what the captain says goes” is literally VITALLY important. It’s how people don’t die.
…presuming the captain isn’t literally trying to kill the crew, but. That doesn’t normally happen?
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*Aspen, not Alden, oops.
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This chapter felt a bit more “safe” like they are atarting ri rake things into their own hands again. I hope. Or maybe it is just the beginning of things further spiralling out of control. I’m still sad about sunset and the others (except Heli and maybe Sands.) But I am more sad about the greenhouse! At least they’ll save the bees!
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gee this spaceship sure gets normaler by the minute
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Ok, so I came back to this after a little while of not reading because I had caught myself up. I just wanted to clarify: are they saying the computer tried to kill that part of the crew because they didn’t have the chips in their arms, so it assumed that they were pulling the same thing Reimann was? It’s been a while since I read the chapter where they explain why Reimann was locked into the chronostasis ring.
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I dont know if it was specifically about the chips but it probably saw casualties of innocent crew members as acceptable to prevent anorher rogue captain who had already tried to kill crew and was a liability.
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God, everything went so bad so fast. I genuinely have no idea where the test of this is going to go
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i don’t like this anymore, I am tense and stressed instead of sleeping. If only I could go back to the days before I found that fateful tumblr post and didn’t heed its warnings… When I was free and could do what I want with my time…
Now I’m ensnared by this story
(as in this is such, such a good story, such masterful writing, and it’s so satisfying watching the patreon list grow because you definitely deserve it!)
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Things just keep going from bad to worse on this ship, damn.
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the new captain is handling this pretty well! But god damn for being homicidal Amy sure was useful in keeping things running. Same for our latest late captain too I suppose.
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“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.”
but usually, they had the option to go outside and didn’t spend all their time where they lived
“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.”
oh, good idea
“I want eight space suits in every single inhabited ring”
yes, exactly!
“Calmly, I try to look up at least some basic information on how to actually be a psychologist.”
heartbreaking
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all but one of the new characters I wanted to learn more about are dead. another ~1000 of the sleeping colonists have been sacrificed in a reimann gambit, with seemingly no way of stopping or reversing this. the ship’s ai is completely dysfunctional, even more so than it was before. christ, this is bleak. but I’m gonna keep reading, because surely it can’t be as hopeless and irreversible as it looks, right?
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