153: FEVER

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I wake up in darkness.

I’m sore, warm, and on a bed; not the stretched canvas of the Hylaran beds, but on a thin mattress on a solid surface. My muscles don’t want to move, but I force myself to feel my arms for ports and find a single drip line going into my right arm and a pulse monitor on my thumb. You collapse, they take you to medical. Makes sense.

“You’re awake!” a pleasant voice says. “How are you feeling, Aspen?”

I know the voice, I know that distinctive cadence of an AI. It’s Mama. For some reason. As it speaks, some dim lights come on, dim enough not to hurt my eyes and bright enough to see that I am not in the medical dome that I’ve been going to with Dr Kim. This is a much smaller room with solid walls, and the furniture – a cabinet, a little desk, the bed I’m lying on – is moulded into the walls of the room itself. There’s a free-standing chair and the IV in my arm is attached to a bag on a frame with wheels, but most of the furniture was built with the room as one solid piece. Between that and the presence of the AI, I figure I’m probably on the Hylaran ship.

“Not great,” I admit. “What happened? Problem with the eye?”

“You’re fine,” the AI says soothingly. Dr Kim thought it might be the eye, but scans show that your synnerves are fine. You have an infection. Do you know what an infection is, Aspen?”

“Yeah. What kind of infection?”

“There was a disease sleeping in your body. Something in the world woke it up! It’s not something that got tested for when you landed. But it’s okay, the doctor gave you some medicine, and you will get better. You’re in quarantine. Do you know what quarantine is, Aspen?”

“Yes, I know what quarantine is,” I snap. I remind myself that this AI’s main job is raising babies. I shouldn’t expect otherwise from it.

“Good! You’re so smart. I know hospital can be scary, but once you’re all better you can go back to your setmates without making them sick.”

“What am I infected with?”

“There’s a type of germ that was sleeping in – ”

“What. Is the species. Of the germ?”

The AI tells me, and I don’t bother to try to memorise the name because it’s nothing I’m even remotely familiar with.

“The rest of the landing crew, they’re tested for it now?”

“Dr Kim is checking them right now!”

“Are there antibiotics in this IV?”

“Yes!”

“Right. Okay. Okay.” That’s fine. Good that the AI thinks they can cure it, good that it was caught, good that there’s good medical treatment. With all the international travel I used to do, I’m used to quarantine. Sucks to be doing it alone when last time I had the whole ground crew, but hey.

“I’d like to get to know you better, Aspen. Do you want to play a game with me?”

“Not particularly.” Knowing it’s going to hurt, I get up. There’s pins and needles in my hands and feet, but I can walk. I take a look around the room.

Two doors. A small one that opens into a little bathroom, and a big, sealed one. That one’s locked, of course. There’s a window in it, showing an empty corridor, and a little hatch next to it that opens into a small box, presumably for passing things back and forth. I can’t tell what sterilisation procedures are built into the box.

The room as a whole is very clean but not, of course, new. There’s wear on the walls and floor, scratches in the edges of things. If I’m inside the spaceship, like I expect, then it’s an old medical room, and that’s expected. There’s a display screen mounted in the wall behind the desk, behind a thick transparent window, presumably to make the room easier to sterilise without having to clean any delicate electronics. There’s a basic hygiene kit in the bathroom, and somebody’s left food and a jug of water on the desk, so I suppose that my infection doesn’t preclude eating. I’m not hungry right now, though. I’m just hurting. I feel like I’ve slept on my neck wrong, except it’s not just my neck, it’s my whole body.

I’ve never, in my life, had a fever come on this rapidly. This isn’t something that crept up over time; I was fine, and then my neck and back hurt, and then I passed out, and now this. Either this infection is fucking with my body in a way I’ve never experienced before (worrying), or I’ve been unconscious long enough for a fever to fully develop (also worrying). Dehydration might be a factor, despite the drip in my arm; I pour myself a cup of water with trembling hands, sit on the edge of the bed, and sip it.

As soon as I’m confident enough that I have the dexterity for it, I remove my fake eye. The AI had said that the synnerves weren’t the problem, but my body’s dealing with enough right now. I immediately lose some of my sense of where things are on the right side of me, which is interesting, because I wasn’t aware I was making use of that kind of information from the bionic. I finish my water, get back up and stretch a bit.

“Will you play a game with me, Aspen?”

I sigh. “What game would you like to play, Mama?”

“We should count together! Do you want to count to ten?”

“Not particularly.”

“Come on! We can make it a song if you want.”

Count to ten. Diagnostic? Checking my reasoning or something? Maybe. I count to ten.

“That was great, Aspen! We should to more counting games!”

“Do we have to?”

“We don’t have to, but do you know how to skip count? We should count to ONE HUNDRED, skip counting by fives! That means we only say every fifth number! We’ll take turns with each number. I’ll start! Five.”

The AI has me skip count by fives, and then by threes. When it asks me to do some simple multiplication, I figure out what’s going on. This AI was designed to raise children; it meets its charges as babies and watches them grow up. Someone new has recently been thrown into its database that doesn’t match the behaviour of ‘baby’. It’s trying to figure out what age and mental competency group to file me into.

It’s faster to play along than to try to convince it I’m an adult off-script, so I do some math games, some logic games, some physical coordination games. I score terribly on history and general knowledge, because what Hylarans apparently learn and what I learned as a kid are very different. The general knowledge, in fact, helps me glean some facts, such as the reason that the near-perpetual overcast sky doesn’t rain whereas the recent short-lived clouds do is that they specific part of the atmosphere that the usual clouds are in is thin and has a very low evaporation point and raindrops have a hard time nucleating there for… reasons I don’t understand, although the AI thinks I should. The Vault (although the AI insists I call it by its real title, the ‘materials port’) is built into the side of the very ship I’m in, although it’s not in any way accessible from inside the ship (you have to go down the guarded corridor), and transfers an average of nine loads with the Earth system per day. It is very, very important that we maintain transfer quotas, because we need Antarctica to like us. There are important safety rules, and when we live out on the surface as adults there are new rules, and the Leadership is in charge of making sure that they are fair but everyone is involved in making them and agreeing to them, and it’s very important to follow the rules. The Leadership is elected from the setmeet, where one member of each set meets up to agree on things; the people from the setmeet who have the most votes go to the Leadership.

I learn that there used to be more Hylarans, until we stopped meeting quota, and Antarctica got very mad, but everything is safe now. I learn that the community is there for everyone but your set is always there for you, specifically, and it’s important that your setmates can rely on you as well. I learn that the Earth sent a starship out to resupply resupply Hylara but it never arrived, and the first algal farms failed, and that’s why we have to rely so heavily on the Vault. I learn a little bit about the machines used to make things to supply the colony and am quite surprised to learn that Hylara’s metal refining technology in leagues ahead of anything I’d ever been aware of; they can purify and deoxidise and shape metal at incredibly low temperatures with very low energy outlay. Their solar panel technology is far ahead of anything I know, too, and I haven’t even seen any solar panels here (which makes sense; the sky is perpetually overcast and the ship’s reactor can easily provide all the power they need, but it’s good to know that the settlement will be okay when the reactor eventually fails).

I shouldn’t be surprised. I keep thinking of Hylara as on par with the Courageous, technologically; their ship would’ve launched fairly shortly after and while they’ve been on the planet for awhile, local conditions aren’t really conducive to massive leaps forward in manufacturing technology. But that’s the wrong way to think about it. Hylara are in contact with Antarctica, meaning that they have whatever modern Earth technology that Antarctica deigns to give them. Which puts them a century and a half ahead of the Courageous, at least in technology both useful enough to the Antarcticans and possible to transport through the Vault. Most of the lifestyle tech I’ve seen on the surface is very familiar (either computing has made few leaps forward in the last 150 years or Hylarans are given ancient machines), with a few exceptions like their rings fitting tiny computers and radios in them. But it makes perfect sense for manufacturing and power production to be far ahead of us.

I hope the others are digging into that, while I’m in quarantine. It’ll probably affect the drop priorities for materials and dictate the speed at which new colonists can be dropped down. Maybe that’s something I can do while in here, since the AI seems much less reluctant to tell me things than the Hylarans have been.

An AI being clearer with information than people. That’s a new one.

Dr Kim appears on the other side of the door. “Aspen. How are you feeling?”

“Not great, but not dead. What happened? Is everyone alright?”

“No sign of infection from the rest of your crew, but I want to do some more thorough tests. Nobody else has had trouble yet. I’d like to beat this thing before we need to worry about your allergic reaction to the dead synnerves in your brain, which puts us on a treatment schedule, but – ”

“We have about a year before that, right? Sorry, more like… closer to two years, local time. I can’t do math right now. Anyway. This can’t possibly take that long, can it?”

“No, it absolutely shouldn’t. I’m hoping to beat the infection in a week at most and then have you in quarantine for another two or three weeks to make sure. But if something does go wrong, that’s our hard deadline. What happened to your eye?”

“I took it out. I don’t think growing a bunch of synnerves in my brain is the best thing to do while this infection is going on.”

“The synnerves will grow regardless. The safest thing to do is train them with feedback by wearing the eye.”

They grow regardless? That doesn’t sound entirely safe. I should’ve taken note of that before agreeing to the implant. Maybe I should get them killed once I’m out of quarantine; it shouldn’t be that long before the Courageous can send a surgeon down, right?

For now, I just stick the eye back in. If I’ve got the synnerves anyway, I might as well try to see.

“Do you need anything?” Dr Kim asks. “The rest of your crew want to talk to you. Should I bring them in?”

I nod. Dr Kim nods. She disappears back down the hall.

Another quarantine. Great.

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