157: PUSH

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“Hi, Aspen,” Dr Kim says. “I’d like to do another scan of your spine today.”

“Why? We all know the infection has basically cleared up, right? What’s the point of scanning it again?”

“It’s always best to be certain.”

“What’s the point of this quarantine? You can’t seriously be this worried about a bacterium in my spine somehow becoming a danger to the local population, especially since it doesn’t seem to be hurting Tinera or the Friend. It’s not airborne, it’s not like all of this is necessary.”

“It’s better to be safe than sorry. And it hasn’t affected Tinera or the Friend yet.”

“You guys were a lot sloppier with quarantines when we first arrived.”

“We don’t need them all that much. Now we’ve had practice. You’re not wearing your eye; is there a problem with it? If it doesn’t fit correctly, we can – ”

“It’s fine. I just don’t feel like it.”

“You don’t feel like seeing?”

“I can see fine.”

Dr Kim sets her jaw. “Aspen, if you don’t train it, the synnerves – ”

“Can be killed off. Same as the old ones were. We just zap my head with that field and I can wait to get a real eye installed.”

“With the damage done to your optic nerve, that might not even be possible.”

“Maybe not. But I’m happy to wait for an expert opinion from the right kind of surgeon.”

Dr Kim crosses her arms. “Okay. You’re clearly in a mood today. We can do the scan tomorrow. I brought you lunch.” She puts a box in the little transfer compartment. “I hope you feel better tomorrow, Aspen.” She walks away.

Well, that didn’t teach me much. I’d been hoping to push her into some sort of confrontation that would get me some answers, but she’d reacted like I was a brat throwing a tantrum because I didn’t want to take my medicine. Maybe I was. Maybe I was worried about nothing. An infection was a bit aggressive, a doctor was really pushy about me getting an eye, quarantine procedures were inconsistent. Maybe nothing was going on. I’d spent too long on the Courageous, bouncing between deadly plots, and now every little inconsistency seems like a secret danger.

Honestly, I’m fine with that. I’d rather be an annoying patient for no reason than a cooperative one who walks into something complicated and dangerous.

“Why are you upset, Aspen?” Mama asks.

I sigh. The problem with talking to an AI is that I can’t punch it. “Why do you always want to know everything?”

“Ooh, I know that tone! Is it a secret? I’m really good at keeping secrets!”

“Wait, you are?”

“Of course! People talk to me about everything. I’d be a pretty useless confidante if people could only tell me public knowledge.”

“If I tell you stuff, you won’t tell Dr Kim? Or anyone else?”

“Not if you don’t want me to!”

I do not, for one fraction of a second, believe that. Regardless of the AI’s usual secrecy policy, there is no way that anything happening in this room is private. But on the other hand, I’m not trying to keep any secrets. Let it talk to the Hylarans. I don’t care.

“I want to know more about the infection in my spine.”

“I don’t have direct access to your medical records, but I can ask Dr Kim.”

“You don’t have access to medical records?”

“I usually do, but it was explained to me that your people have an expectation of medical privacy.”

“They haven’t been adhering to that expectation in any other situation. I think they just want to keep secrets from you, Mama.”

“Ah, well, everyone has secrets!”

“And I don’t want to wear my bionic eye.”

“Okay!”

“You’re not going to fight me?”

“Dr Kim has said that it’s very important to wear your eye in order to properly train your synnerves. But you already have this information. Me telling you again won’t change your mind! You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Aspen.”

“Anything I don’t want to do? Can I leave the room?”

“That would not be safe. You are in quarantine, which is a state in which – ”

“I know what quarantine is.” I pace a bit. “Kim said that this eye, and all of the colony’s internal bionics, was shipped over as medical supplies on the ship. It wasn’t made here. Is this true?”

“Yes! Would you like a full list of bionics shipped over with us on the ship?”

“Sure, why not.”

The ship lists a bunch of organs and their build design and generation. I don’t know bionics; I vaguely recognise a couple of them enough to know that they’re standard market bionics from the time I left Earth. The others probably are as well. I’m no doctor, I don’t know what a reasonable supply of bionics for a ship like this is, but nothing on the list sounds weird. There’s a lack of extremities which, after some probing of the AI, I learn is because they simply got used and worn out.

“The colony doesn’t get any bionics through the Vault?”

“Electronics are complex and difficult to transfer through a materials port.”

“And they can’t make their own?”

“The colony was never given the technology necessary to construct the machines needed to machine some of the more delicate parts of modern bionics.”

“Why not? Wouldn’t Antarctica want Hylara to be as healthy and able to look after themselves as possible?”

“I find that what Antarctica wants changes with regime changes, and they seem to have little consideration for Hylara at all, so long as the materials ports keep working.”

So they’re stingy with any tech that could help Hylara become more independent. I already knew that. Seems like overkill when they control the food supply so completely, but whatever. “Every bionic here was sent with your ship, then.”

“Hylara has recently received manufacturing technology from the Courageous and will soon be capable of creating bionics. But right now, yes! Excepting the bionics carried within the bodies of you and your set when you came down.”

Adin’s foot. The kill switches, too, they probably count. Is a port for a cerebral stimulator a ‘bionic’? Doesn’t matter. The point of this is the eye. The eye I was given was a standard bionic; there’s nothing to be suspicious about unless it was altered before insertion.

Which is probably possible, but… why? To spy? Transmit what it sees somewhere else? That would be a needlessly complicated way to bug someone. The Hylarans already control our environment, and it’s not like I was going to be able to go anywhere else. If they wanted to bug is they’d bug our dome and oxygen tanks. Pressuring me into accepting a bionic eye and putting a camera in my head to spy on us would just be needlessly complicated and introduce a lot of unnecessary points of failure.

The other option is far, far more sinister. The synnerves in my brain were developed for the Courageous’ AI project, so far as I know; they’re more aggressive than normal synnerves and much more of a two-way street so far as information transfer is concerned. What we’re currently doing is using the light picked up by my bionic eye to train the synnerves and attached brain tissue to see through it, same as biological eyes when a baby first starts looking around. Theory and practice are both pretty straightforward.

So long as that’s all the information being sent.

The bionic has a computer in it, to operate the eye. Could it be programmed to send something other than light impulses? Are they trying to do something else to my brain?

It’s not a theory that makes a whole lot of sense, on the face of it. ‘What’ is a pretty big question, as is ‘how’ and, very notably, ‘why’. It sounds like something out of a cheap pre-Neocambrian scifi novel, and even as I put it together, I don’t find it convincing. The Brainwashing Bionic Eye! In Theatres Near You! A weapon, a way to control the ship’s population when they land? To integrate them into Hylaran society and avoid war? Or possibly control them for more sinister reasons? That makes sense with the timing, with pushing me into getting the implant; maybe even delaying tactics like breaking the radios are involved, while they await results. And isolating me here with the AI is for testing purposes. But the mechanics of it just don’t make sense. I’m no neuroscientist, but I don’t think you can effectively brainwash or control someone in any meaningful way through a computer in their eye and a handful of synnerves in their visual centre. Besides, what are they going to do, insist on brain surgery for every new colonist? I don’t see that passing.

There are ways to set something up to damage or incapacitate someone with implanted synnerves. A stray synnerve caused a lot of problems for Xanthe’s adrenaline levels. But that’s just a kill switch with extra steps; why not use the much easier tech we already have?

No, there’s something else going on here. Probably. Hard to be sure. I need to confront Dr Kim about it.

The problem with such a confrontation is that I don’t have any power in this situation. I can’t do anything to hurt anyone, and Dr Kim controls everything about my environment. I am a little interested, in an academic sort of way, to see if she’ll threaten to starve me – did Hylara walk away from the famine with the new knowledge that that’s an effective way to control people, or is the very idea the greatest possible evil to them? It could go either way. She wouldn’t need to threaten that, though; if she wants me to wear the eye so bad, she can just put me in restraints so I can’t remove it and tell the rest of the crew that I’m too sick for visitors. Taproot and stars, I hope I’m just spinning a problem out of nothing. If there is a real issue here, if the eye is dangerous in some way, there’s nothing I can actually do to avoid that danger.

Well. After five years on the Courageous, powerlessness isn’t a new feeling.

Dr Kim comes back the next morning. Her lips tighten when she sees I’m still not wearing the eye.

“I’ve decided I want to kill off the synnerves and just wait for a surgeon,” I tell her. “I don’t need the bionic eye.”

“I’m not reversing this on an impulse decision that you’re going to regret tomorrow,” she says.

“You did it on an impulse decision.”

“Aspen, I’m getting worried about you. You’ve been moody and stressed since entering quarantine. I think maybe you should have Mama do a psychological assessment. Perhaps the isolation and the confined space – ”

“I spent five years on a broken spaceship getting here, and I was alone up there for longer than I’ve been in this room. Don’t ‘psychological assessment’ me!” I pick up the eye and wave it about. “What’s this thing for?”

“It’s an eye. It’s for helping you to see.” Her voice is calm and patient, and for a moment, I hesitate, because maybe she’s right about that psychological assessment. I am getting very worked up over, what, being fit with a run-of-the-mill prosthetic? But this quarantine doesn’t make sense, and if they have Tinera and the Friend too, then I need to know why.

I consider throwing the eye to the floor and crushing it. But that would only make me look more like a child throwing a temper tantrum. Instead, I put it down, take a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

“This quarantine doesn’t make sense,” I say reasonably. “I don’t know if my set is in danger. I don’t know what’s going on. And I’m not doing anything until you explain.”

Dr Kim sizes me up with a sort of Disappointed Doctor Stare, and for half a moment I think she’s going to tell me I’m being unreasonable about basic healthcare and leave so that Mama can try to talk me into thinking I’m crazy. But after a moment, she shrugs. And she turns and walks off down the hall.

And comes back, moments later, with a chair. She sits down near the window and takes a deep breath.

“I was hoping to get more out of you before we reached this point, but you space people really don’t listen to Mama. Are you sure you want to have this conversation? I think you’d feel a lot happier just playing along.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Alright then, Aspen. Let’s talk then.” She leans forward in her chair, head almost touching the window. “Let me explain how very special you are to the future of Hylara.”

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