“He could just let the ship get caught in some planet’s gravity well. Then we’ll crash-land on it, spraying Lyfe protein everywhere and maybe triggering new life. Our ghosts will be on that new planet, and we could be their gods. That would be really interesting, actually.”
“Except we would be dead,” Maria said. “And we’d be gods of paramecium.”
“Details,” Hiro said, waving her off. “It’s our job to figure out how to get past IAN and get moving the right direction. I just don’t see how I don’t have permission for my own ship. Why does an AI outrank me and the captain?”
“Because it’s my job. Your crew can’t be trusted,” IAN said.
“Thanks, IAN, we knew that,” Maria asked. “But I might be able to figure out how to talk to him.”
Hiro swerved around on his seat to look at her skeptically. “I thought you said you weren’t a programmer.”
“I’m not,” she said. “But I have a drive scanner so I can do some diagnostics on the data stored in the Behemoth. It’s what reads the tiny bit of your mindmap that refers to your favorite foods. It’s configured for food printers, but it is a scanner so it may be able to find our missing data.”
Hiro frowned. “But if IAN himself can’t override his own programming, then why would your scanner do any better?”
Maria shrugged. “Just a thought. Keep it for when we’re desperate.”
“I’ll see if Paul can hack into it,” he said. “We’ll keep that as plan B.”
She grinned. “Come on, you are putting it near plan L, right after ‘hope for a first-contact scenario where aliens speak one of our languages and they understand our tech and can override our mother AI,’ aren’t you?”
“I never said such a thing,” he said.
Maria’s tablet chimed, and she pulled it out. She frowned. “Captain needs me. It’s time to clean up the cloning bay.”
“Don’t let me keep you,” Hiro said, making some notes on the tablet he had found. “Good luck with that.”
“So you don’t want to help me out?” she asked, smiling slightly.
“You were supposed to help me today. You’re abandoning me to IAN and a monster of math!”
“Careful, Hiro, I can smell the bullshit from all the way over here.”
He grinned at her.
She could almost forget—or at least forgive—his earlier outburst.
He’d said he didn’t remember doing it, but he looked grim, as if his tirade didn’t surprise him.
Joanna intercepted Maria on her way to the cloning bay. “A moment, Maria?”
“Anything to put off cleaning that crime scene,” Maria said.
Maria followed her into the medbay, and they went into Joanna’s office. Joanna sat at her desk and motioned for Maria to sit on a leather chair. It was a very neat office, with nothing out of place. She must have tidied after the sudden loss of gravity.
“IAN, I need privacy,” Joanna said.
There was no answer.
“He would give you privacy?” Maria said, raising her eyebrow.
“No,” Joanna said. She opened a drawer and retrieved a roll of black tape. She got up and put pieces of it over the camera sensors and microphones. “But he would protest if he could hear me. Which I don’t think he can.”
“This is sounding ominous.”
Joanna sighed and sat down again. She folded her hands on her lap, but Maria could see the tension in her shoulders and arms.
“If I couldn’t trust you, asking you, Can I trust you? would be a waste of time,” she began.
Maria tried to parse the sentence. “Huh?”
“I’m essentially telling you I am trusting you, but it’s because I am forced to.”
“…All right.” Maria wanted to ask questions but was curious how much the doctor would offer her without prompting.
“Paul didn’t die from asphyxiation,” she said. “He died from an overdose of ketamine.”
“What is that?” Maria asked.
“A painkiller that can kill in high doses. If you use it carelessly as a recreational drug, or have it injected into you, you can die quickly.” She paused, but Maria said nothing. She continued. “When doing my inspection of his body, I found a small puncture. My tox screen on him found the overdose. Someone shot him full of something. Possibly before the fight, possibly during. We need to find that syringe.”
“And you’re telling me and not the captain or Wolfgang because a syringe would be a perfect murder weapon for a doctor?” Maria asked.
Joanna rubbed her face and dropped her hands to her lap. “That, and you are about to clean the crime scene, giving you a good chance to find the syringe. But I don’t want to implicate myself until I know everything. If you find it, bring it to me. If you don’t, then, I guess we will keep our eyes out.”
Maria nodded. “I’ll watch for it. Anything else?”
“I hope it goes without saying that I’m trusting you to keep this between us until we know more?”
“Understood,” she said.
Joanna let out a massive sigh. “Thank you.”
Paul lay in his room, letting the sick, glorious feeling of grease and carbohydrates carry him away. He wanted to think of nothing more than the feeling of his stomach, obscenely full for the first time ever.
Still, he needed to know what was going on. He racked his brain to figure out if there was a way he could have hidden anything away from everyone’s eyes, including IAN’s. They had no digital logs. What about a physical journal? His employer had gifted him with an incredibly expensive book made from real paper before he’d left. He couldn’t find it in the chaos of his room.
His tablet chimed, two deets. Insistent. It was the captain.
“Paul, where are you? Break’s over, I need you to keep working on the computers.”
If she had to ask him where he was, did that mean IAN couldn’t see the cameras in his room yet?
He rolled over on his bed and got his tablet. “Be right there, Captain.”
He washed his face. He looked like death. A fit and healthy twenty-year-old death. He had to get out of this misery or they would suspect him. Possibly more than they already did.
He wished he could remember what had happened. It was very disorienting to know that he had lost years of his memory, that there was no one to mourn his past self. He wondered if the others had ever lost so much of their memories.
He locked his room and headed down the hall. Passing the cloning bay, he heard a flurry of activity. Maria was there with a mask and gloves on and a hose that was screwed into the wall. She was spraying steam where blood had caked. The stench was impressive. He covered his face and continued down the hall.
The captain was at the terminal in the server room, pulling up the virtual UI.
“I don’t envy Maria,” he said in greeting.
“She knew it came with the territory,” Katrina said, waving her hand to dismiss pity for the woman whose job it was to steam vomit, blood, and feces off the wall. “Now that IAN is up and running, I need you to find out the status of the mindmapping hardware and software, then check on the cryo tubes.”