Longer than I had been alive.
Loese told me—without naming it—about the ship that, decans before, had stumbled across Big Rock Candy Mountain and its self-repair program run wild and hit upon the idea of hacking it and repurposing it to disable Core General and bring the critical eye of the Synarche’s population to bear on the activities going on behind closed doors.
“What about Calliope?”
“She was medical waste,” Loese said, with justified bitterness. “Her progenitor died before the download could be arranged, and our chief organizer arranged to salvage her. And to use gene therapy to alter her DNA.”
I wondered who the chief organizer was. The shadowy Mx. Big behind it all.
Somebody in Cryo? Not Rilriltok, I thought. I couldn’t imagine my excitable, enthusiastic, nerdy little friend managing to keep a lie that big, that interesting, a secret from me for the fifteen ans we’d known each other.
An additional problem was that none of what they had discovered was technically illegal. Unawakened clones were not considered Synizens: they had no life experience, no legal personhood. I was sure Loese could see that I was as horrified as she was that anybody would make a clone, grow it to adulthood, exercise its brain and body into proper development with virtual experiences… and then put it in cryostasis until it was needed as a replacement body.
“How did the generation ship get moved?” I asked. “That’s been bothering me.”
“We couldn’t have done that if that salvage mission hadn’t turned up the Koregoi gravity generators,” she said. “But when the hospital refit began, we managed to liberate some test models.”
“Cheeirilaq knows about that. That was what made me wonder if Tsosie was involved,” I said. “He was interested in those test models.”
“We copied them, and by integrating them into the self-replicating tinkertoy machine’s code, we made one big enough to, er, distort space-time and slide Big Rock Candy Mountain close enough to a white space jump point that somebody could plausibly stumble across her.”
I wondered if the gravity generators, used that way, compensated in some way for relativistic effects. I wondered if you could use them to manipulate the time part of space-time as well as the space part.
I decided that now was not the time to find out.
“This all must have taken decans.”
“It did,” Loese said. “This clone thing has been going on for a very long time. We didn’t have the last pieces until recently, however.”
“Afar and his crew were in on the conspiracy?”
“He was the ship that found Big Rock Candy Mountain in the first place,” she admitted, reluctantly. “They were…”
“Smuggling?”
“… off the normal trade routes.”
“Did he know that you planned to sacrifice him and his crew?”
“What happened to Afar was an accident. He and his crew were supposed to drop off the walker and the cryo tube holding Calliope and leave. We did not expect him to get infected with the meme, and we really didn’t expect it to affect his crew.” She shook her head. “Afar must have really screwed up somehow. I don’t know how he could have messed up so badly that he, his crew, and the walker all got infected.”
“You keep saying ‘accident’…” I squinted at Loese, remembering the dropped coms, the sabotage to Sally. “You and Sally tried to kill me!”
“We knew you’d survive,” she said.
It was a nice vote of confidence. You’ll forgive me if I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time. “You risked my life and Tsosie’s life. To—what, make sure we were on the ship long enough to find the right cryo coffins? Sally did come back online awfully conveniently once we were there.”
“She needed—” Loese looked at her hands. “She needed to control the machine, and make sure that the accident with the coffins happened the right way, to ensure that you weren’t hurt in the process.”
“Why didn’t you just tell somebody?”
She sighed. “Do you think nobody tried? It all sounds like rumors and conspiracy theories. We needed proof. We needed evidence. And none of this is illegal. It’s only awful.”
“You had,” I said distinctly, “a discarded, fully grown, sapient clone of a dead rich woman, with a fully developed brain. And you didn’t think that was evidence enough? No, you decided it was a better idea to do exactly what the fucking mad scientists here at Core Gen were doing, and implant false memories in her, rip out her fox, and hide her on a generation ship where there was a very good chance that she would die.”
“She didn’t,” Loese said. “And it was for the best cause imaginable.”
I had to tune in order not to hit her. Hitting people almost never solves anything, and you can trust me on that. I was in the military.
“So the virus, the toxic meme, came in with the machine? Sally used herself as a mule to bring it back?”
“Sally used herself as a mule to bring it back,” Loese agreed. “But the important part of the meme, the part that infected Zhiruo, wasn’t in the machine. Or Helen. They were only… along for the ride.”
I didn’t ask. I waited.
“The virus was encoded in Calliope’s DNA.”
“What?” Loese had said they’d altered Calliope’s DNA. I had assumed she meant to make her seem like she belonged among the corpsicles.
“The meme. It’s programmed into her. That was why Afar got sick. That was why Dr. Zhiruo got sick. The meme was there to be read into their memories when they scanned Jones’s DNA or contacted each other. The orderliness in her wasn’t poetry.
“It was malignant code.”
“You poisoned Dr. Zhiruo on purpose?” And Afar. And Linden!… Maybe those had been accidents. But still.
A responsible person, a healthy-minded person, would not put herself into a position where that kind of accident happened.
Loese reached out
