155: STOCKPILE

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“Mama, how many people currently live on Hylara?”

“397 people.”

I relax. 392 Hylarans plus my crew; that’s the expected answer. “Why is the colony being supplied for 464 Hylarans?” That’s a reasonable thing to do, to provide excess in case of emergency, it just doesn’t seem like something that people who’d starved a bunch of Hylarans to death to scare them out of ever striking again would do.

I love that nobody bothered to tell this AI to keep secrets from me. It doesn’t even try to dodge and weave around the question like Max would. It immediately just tells me. “After the famine, Hylara was ordered to bring the population up to 58 complete sets over several years. However, the Leadership decided to create fewer new citizens than ordered. They sent false numbers to Antarctica and shuffled around workloads and resource reports to give the impression of a larger population, while stockpiling the extra food.”

“Insurance against another famine.”

“Yes.”

Yes, that would work. Antarctica wouldn’t dare to kill off enough of the Hylarans that they’d risk destroying the colony entirely. I’m not sure exactly how reproduction is set up, I don’t know if Mama can start a colony from scratch again without actual people involved, but even if it can, it’s quite risky and would leave a delay of many years where the Vault can’t be used at all since there’s no one old and trained enough to run it. Antarctica would be forced to send supplies while a work population still exists, one big enough to recover, meaning there’s a maximum number that Hylara can actually lose to such a famine before Antarctica would have to stop starving them. There are far more Hylarans than there actually needs to be to run the Vault and keep the colony alive, but that’s necessary for basic stability, an emergency reserve in case of disaster – and leverage, I suppose, with the possibility of famine on the table.

If Antarctica believes that Hylara has the demanded 464 citizens but there’s only 392 (not counting Courageous people, obviously), that creates protection against future famines on a couple of different fronts. First, it means that 72 people’s worth of supplies can be stockpiled against emergencies, Antarctica-inflicted or otherwise. Second, in the event of another famine, it gives them 72 ‘free deaths’, where they can pretend that nonexistent citizens have died, and throws off Antarctica’s calculations for what food to send in such circumstances (they must have still sent some during the famine, they couldn’t risk everyone dying), while simultaneously being able to feed other citizens on the stockpiled food. The Hylarans responded to the previous famine by drawing lots and choosing who would die; Antarctica could reasonably expect them to respond to a second famine in the same way, thus giving the Hylarans control over the timing of the ‘deaths’. With the fake deaths, using stockpiled food, and pretending to kill off nonexistent and then existent citizens quickly enough that the famine ends and demands for a population increase come through before the stockpiles run out, it might be possible for Hylara to lie its way through such a famine without losing any citizens at all. If they were lucky. At the very least, loss of life would be minimised.

Clever. Very clever. They hadn’t even tried to lie to us; they knew we’d learn their real population after landing. But Antarctica is very, very far away, and with only one port of communication with them, the information they receive is easy to control. So why not make up 72 extra people?

It’d be fascinating to study the attitudes of Hylarans toward Antarctica pre- and post- famine. They were raised here from birth to man the Vault, to be part of the supply chain, and built their culture ultimately on information given to them by Antarctica; I have to imagine that levels of trust used to be much higher. If everything you need to survive comes out of a big room supplied by a far-away benefactor who’s never hurt you, and your duty is to maintain that room, there’s a potential for a lot of trust and little inclination to rebellion in a relationship like that. Until you’re betrayed. How much of a shock must the famine have been? There’s no way that the Hylarans would have heard of strikebreaking tactics before, or the cruelty inflicted by empires on subjugated populations for control, or simply for a dispassionate, unfeeling desire for resources. They’d only just learned what a strike was. To a population who’d been adequately supplied since their very beginning, a sudden restriction in resources killing them off must have been inconceivable until they were living through it.

Somehow, that thought makes me even more furious than the idea of a controlled famine on a normal population, which is pretty fucking difficult because starving any group of people for money or control is already an evil that’s pretty hard to beat. At least they’ll never have to worry about that again, now that the Courageous is dropping seeds. Instead they’ll need to worry about the Courageous.

There’s a decent chance, I think, that we can integrate the populations peacefully, at least at first. If we can expect everyone to get along. The information about the Hylarans only being able to reproduce artificially is a bit of a setback, it creates an inherent difference fairly central to social structure that can never be fully resolved unless it becomes common practice to sterilise everyone from Earthborn stock and only reproduce artificially, which frankly I don’t think is going to happen. The differences in development speed and lifespan also create permanent differences likely to remain permanent cultural differences. I don’t see too many ways forward that result in a single community and don’t involve genocide, but two peaceful, intermingled communities under a shared government? Possible.

Risky.

No choice but to try, though.

Dr Kim comes by a bit later in a protective suit like the one that Max used to wear – this one fits Dr Kim perfectly, I notice, and is probably hers; maybe this is usually medical garb – to lead me to a room down the hall to take some scans. She gives me some kind of tracer and I lie still in a big machine that acts a lot like an MRI, although she says it isn’t, while she takes some scans to look for spinal inflammation.

“It’s healing well,” she says. “Provided the antibiotics continue to work, you should be fine within the week. How’s your eye?”

“Fine.” I can distinguish ‘shapes’ now; patches of light and dark rather than just an impression of overall light level, and distinguish high contrast colours from each other. At least, that’s what the exercises show. I’m doing well on subconsciously interpreting information from the eye but I don’t consciously ‘see’ images like I do with my good eye; I can use the eye to locate and pick up objects, avoid walls and soforth, but I’m not consciously sure how. I think my experience with sight through my other eye is tripping me up; I expect vision to be experienced in a certain way, and my bionic eye is doing something different.

Dr Kim seems very excited about the progress, asking the AI for details. “You’ll learn how to make it out consciously,” she says. “The important thing is that you can see! Isn’t that great?”

If is, I have to admit, more convenient than being completely blind on one side. Depth perception tests demonstrate that my bionic eye isn’t helping much on that front; maybe the image isn’t clear enough. But Dr Kim runs me through a colour test and finds the results fascinating.

“Real eye, expected result,” she tells me with a grin. “You’re an RGB trichromat, already noted in your medical record. Bionic eye, incredibly low colour distinction. You can tell apart high contrast colours that are on very different parts of the colour wheel, but even that’s hit-and-miss. Again, expected; you’re learning to see. But with both eyes open – almost full colour vision. Your bionic eye is informing you of the difference in purple shades that your natural eye can’t perceive.”

“They still look the same to me,” I say, puzzled.

“And yet you were able to distinguish them.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know how.”

She grins wider. “As I said. You’ll probably learn to consciously see the visual information in time. It might feel like seeing with your natural eye, it might not. But you are receiving the information and your brain is using it. That’s an amazing leap forward.”

I do more eye exercises. I watch more movies. I learn a little about the Hypati launcher and how it was used to launch incredibly hot radioactive pellets into the ice caps, shielded to prevent excessive radiation leakage, to start melting liquid water for the planet. I learn about the oxygen strippers used to pull water molecules apart and oxygenate the atmosphere (by which I mean I learn basically what they are; they were invented when I was deep in chronostasis and far beyond my limited chemical and physical knowledge). I learn about the pockets of neon in the planet’s crust scoped out and disrupted by huge machines sent piece by piece through the Vault like the Hypati launcher itself, assembled by previous generations of Hylarans and uploaded with simple AIs and sent out to make an atmosphere, back in days when every spare minute was spent on machine assembly. I go to sleep.

The next day, the crew come around without Captain Klees. He’s had his new foot put on and can’t walk. They tell me that the radio sent by the Courageous is fixed, and they contacted the ship and explained the situation with the Vault. This is good news; I have to assume that the radio sabotage was to stop that information from making it to the Courageous, so at the very least, people should stop breaking the radios now.

A couple of days later, I learn that the pathogen in me came up in Tinera and the Friend’s tests as well. The pair apparently don’t have any health problems for the moment but are quarantined, separate from me. I feel completely fine, with no trace of fever or unusual muscle aches; Dr Kim takes me for another scan, says that the infection’s almost cleared up, but she wants to keep me in quarantine for the initial planned time just to be safe. I try to puzzle out where three of our ground crew could’ve picked up such an infection that missed the rest of us, but there’s so many possibilities that the question isn’t even worth asking. We picked up little cuts and soforth working on the Courageous all the time. I tell the remaining crew to warn the ship so that the crew up there can check themselves as well, but since I’m the only person it’s caused problems for, it’s probably not that big a problem.

The AI consistently wants to talk about my feelings. Dr Kim, just as I’ve observed Max and Hive do in the past, speaks to and about the AI with affection; it did help raise them. She answers its questions patiently when it asks, and takes the advice it offers; I have no interest in any of that. I don’t need an AI therapist. I certainly don’t need an AI to advise me on having good priorities and how to get along in a society.

“Are you bored, Aspen?” it asks me one long afternoon as I zone out watching a documentary about plastic cloth construction.

I shrug.

“You’re lonely. You miss your set.”

“I’ve been alone for longer.”

“It’s always sad to be alone, isn’t it? But I’m sure they miss you too! Patience is a limited resource and you’re doing so well at hoarding and replenishing yours. I know that when you get back to your set, you’ll be able to greet them with a smile, and they’ll be as happy to see you as you will be to see them.”

“Yeah, well, that depends on how long it takes the Friend and Tiny to get out of quarantine.”

“Are you scared for them?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay!” The AI shuts up. I try to pay attention to the documentary.

The crew don’t come to see me that day. I try not to resent them for it.

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