And right now, he and Paul needed to pull the weight of six. Seven, if Paul could get the restriction code back on IAN.
They were in the server room, IAN’s holographic face watching them peer into his code via the virtual UI. He had a vaguely interested look on his face and made no move to stop them.
“You need to figure out what code she removed and put it back,” he said.
“It’s hard to find something that’s not there,” Paul grumbled. “I still can’t believe she was some kind of computer genius. I figured the captain was the hacker. Or Hiro. Or Joanna.”
“Wonderful job at narrowing it down,” Wolfgang snapped.
“Listen, it looks like she deleted the code; the restraint isn’t there, as far as I can see,” Paul said, pointing to code Wolfgang didn’t understand. Paul could be lying to him; Wolfgang wouldn’t know.
“Or it’s there and you can’t recognize it, just like you couldn’t see how to fix IAN in the first place.”
Paul sat back on his heels and looked up at Wolfgang, who towered over him. “It’s possible,” he said, his voice low and cold.
Wolfgang noticed the dangerous tone in Paul’s voice. “Did you know that you suffered some memory loss during the first few years?”
Paul’s face went slack and pale, his anger draining into shock. “What—what do you mean?”
“Your autopsy and some logs we found say that you became violent the first year into the journey,” he said, watching Paul carefully. “Apparently I’m the one who stopped you, hitting you hard enough for you to forget what you were so mad about.” He paused, watching Paul swallow. “So, do you have any idea what you were so mad about?”
He opened his mouth once, twice, like a fish. “You have been bullying me for two days, and then you ask why I may have gotten mad one year into the mission?” he asked, his voice squeaking. “I hate serving this mission with you. Can you blame me?”
“Hey, fellas?” IAN asked.
“What?” Wolfgang said through clenched teeth.
“You do know that if you find that restraining code, it’ll lock down navigation again, right? We’ll start heading home again.”
“Why in the hell—” Wolfgang started, but Paul was nodding, focusing on IAN and avoiding Wolfgang’s eyes.
“He’s right. If we take away his free will then he has to stick with his original programming, which included turning the ship around if something catastrophic happened to the crew. The only way to keep on course is to keep him the way he is.” He stood and crossed his arms, looking up into Wolfgang’s face. “So what do you want to do now?”
“I have to talk to Maria, who may actually be able to do something about this problem,” Wolfgang said, stomping from the room.
“Maria is busy and doesn’t want to be disturbed,” IAN said helpfully through the speakers as Wolfgang headed toward the brig.
“Maria is under arrest in a tiny room with no access to anything that could keep her busy,” Wolfgang snapped. “What could she possibly be doing that’s so important?”
“She’s solving our cloning bay problem right now.”
He picked up speed. “How is she doing that?”
“Oh, I’m helping her.”
Wolfgang gritted his teeth. He really needed that restriction code.
The door to the brig slid open, and Maria sat up from her cot where she had been contemplating the problem of the operating systems and software needed to drive the dead technology. She thought she had an idea, but she would need to test some things out. If IAN would help her.
Wolfgang stood there as if he had found three other crimes she had committed. “What did I tell you about speaking with the AI?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You told him not to speak with me.”
Color brightened his white cheeks. “Pedantic and useless,” he said.
“What do you need, Wolfgang?”
“We need to confine the AI with the restraining code. He’s not following orders, and you’re the only one who can restrain him and possibly keep us on course.”
She swung her legs over the side. “It’s possible I can do that, sure. But how can you trust me?”
“Take this as giving me a reason to trust you,” Wolfgang said.
There was a knock on the wall beyond which sat Joanna.
“Hey, Wolfgang, I have to check on my patients,” she said through the wall.
Wolfgang rubbed his own head and winced. He was one of those patients, Maria remembered.
She got off her cot. “Send Joanna back to medbay, lock her in if you need to. Call Paul, maybe we’ll find something to arrest him for too. We’ll all go to the server room and check out IAN’s code.”
“Hey!” IAN protested.
“I just want to see the code, IAN. I’m not promising anything,” she said.
“Excuse me? You’ll do as ordered by your commanding officer,” Wolfgang said. He took her by the shoulders and propelled her down the hall.
Kind of hard for you to command me to do something you don’t know how to do yourself, she thought. But she didn’t struggle.
IAN’s face in the server room was sullen and downright pouty. Paul stood there, arms crossed.
“What did you say to him?” Paul asked. “He won’t even talk to me.”
“We just wanted to look at his code,” Maria said.
“Yeah, you undress and let me see all of your insides,” IAN said.
Paul looked at Wolfgang. “Do you trust her? The things the old captain said—”
“I know what she said, Paul,” Wolfgang said. “I don’t trust her. That’s why you’re here.”
“Oh.”
Maria realized no one had told Paul that they’d solved one murder: his. There is probably a better time to tell him than right now, she thought. “Come on, let’s take a look,” she said to Paul.
“You’re not going to touch my code, are you?” IAN asked.
“She will if I tell her to,” Wolfgang said, looking like he wanted to slap a physical computer bank to bring a point across, but most of the server room was a holographic UI.
Maria sighed. “I’m promising nothing to either of you. I just want to look at the code.”
“You didn’t look at it when you fixed him or when you removed the restraining code?” Paul asked.
“Sure, but all I did was what I needed to do. I didn’t want to be caught so I didn’t stick around to take a thorough look.”
She used a spreading motion with her hands to open the UI hologram for IAN’s code base, and started looking at his code. She and Paul identified code that gave him access to the whole ship, the commands that were preprogrammed in—no longer applicable if he didn’t want them to be—and some of the key points of his personality matrix. As she and Paul read deeper and deeper into this program, she started to get a sick feeling in her gut. She swallowed.
She closed the UI abruptly, causing Paul to step back, protesting. She ignored him and looked at the face of IAN, who watched her with interest.
“IAN. I am not going to restrain you. You have my word on it.”
“No, wait a minute—” Wolfgang said, but she held up a hand to him while still looking IAN in the face.