A kid. A trainee. I wasn’t a cryo specialist, but the chart wasn’t encouraging for his survival.
You tell yourself not to think about the casualties. You tell yourself you did your best. You helped more than would have been helped otherwise.
Sometimes you still think about the casualties.
“It seems like a valediction.” I stepped closer to Helen. “Helen, your crew. How were they replaced?”
She turned her head to me, blindly. “Dr. Jens?”
“Where did the babies come from, Helen?”
“Oh, we made them. When couples wanted children, we combined and edited their DNA, and produced the offspring.”
“Did you encode markers?”
“The technicians encoded markers,” she agreed.
I put both hands on the tablet, unlocked my exo, and extended it back to Tralgar, somehow managing to not tip myself over in the seconds before the Thunderby relieved me of the weight of its device.
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked at Cheeirilaq, at Tsosie. I didn’t look at Rilriltok, because it was still mostly hiding behind me.
“I think we worry about this some other time,” Tsosie said. “It’s a fascinating cultural artifact. But right now, we need to concentrate on whatever’s causing AIs to go offline.”
“Right,” I said. “That is over my grade.”
It’s not over my grade, the Goodlaw said. But my expertise is in law enforcement, not AI medicine. What do you suggest?
I said, “This is a good time to talk to O’Mara.”
We met them in the observation lounge with the addition of Dr. Tralgar. O’Mara had already been aware of the problems with Linden and Dr. Zhiruo, because Starlight had told them. We still had no idea how the meme was propagating from AI to AI despite the sterile protocols. Figuring out how it had been done, if we were lucky, would put us one step closer to the cure.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we should jettison the pods,” O’Mara said.
“No!” Helen cried, moving forward.
I put an arm out between her and O’Mara. I didn’t think I could stop Helen if she wanted to go through me—but I thought she might hesitate to go through me.
O’Mara rubbed a hand across their short coppery bristles. “I said that we should jettison the pods. Not that we were going to. Nor are we going to jettison Helen, or her machine, or the undocumented military tech that was packed into Afar’s hold. It’s too late, anyway, even if the notion wasn’t morally repugnant: the hospital staff is already infected, and while the pods might be the vector, so might Afar, or Sally, or anything that came into contact. We need to place the hospital under medical interdict—”
“Quarantine,” I clarified, for the staff that didn’t speak Judiciary.
“Right. So on to your other interesting discovery. I’m wondering, do all the patients have the modified DNA?”
“Yes,” Tralgar said. “Including the one in the better-engineered cryo pod.”
“You know,” O’Mara said, “I was not expecting that. Have you decoded her poem yet?”
Tralgar checked his pad. “Dr. Zhiruo had not managed to crack that one. They’re not all encoded the same way, apparently.”
“Of course not.” Tsosie sighed. “That would be too easy.”
O’Mara humphed. “I had been about to guess that Afar most likely brought that additional pod in, possibly using the walker to put it in place. Then… accidentally exposed himself and his crew to the toxic meme that was infecting the generation ship’s systems, since it seems pretty evident at this point that there is a meme, and got trapped there with enough time to trigger his distress beacon?”
Tralgar chirped, disbelievingly. You are speculating that somebody found this derelict ship and started using it to store corpsicles? For reasons unknown?
“I mean,” Tsosie said, “it’s not the only hypothesis. And Cheeirilaq here floated something like it before.”
I’ve seen weirder things, the Goodlaw admitted. Where did the meme come from, then?
“Mercy the archinformist AI suspects that it has devolved from the override codes that Big Rock Candy Mountain’s captain used to force his crew into cryo pods. But that doesn’t explain why Sally didn’t catch it,” I said.
“That’s not actually the peculiar thing.” O’Mara crossed beefy arms. “The peculiar thing is that any of our friends could catch a meme that originated on such archaic system architecture.”
“Aw, pustulence.” Everybody looked at me. “Zhiruo was helping Helen import herself to modern architecture. And adapt her programs to it.”
“That doesn’t explain Afar.”
“No,” Tsosie said. “And it doesn’t explain Afar’s crew, either.”
Tralgar, who seemed to have been holding in a piece of information for a while, waved that reinforced orange datapad for attention and made every attempt to bugle quietly. I made a mental note to print some sound-dampening earplugs if I was going to be spending this much time in Cryo from now on.
It said, We should know if any of the crew might survive rewarming in about twenty-four standard hours.
“Well, good.” O’Mara stuffed meaty hands into their jumpsuit pockets. “If they or any of the other rescues wake up, we can ask ’em what they know about toxic memes from the bottom of space-time. You keep on this. I’ll check in when I’ve heard something from Starlight or Linden, or if Afar or his crew regain consciousness.”
We hear and understand, friend O’Mara, Rilriltok said.
O’Mara cleared their throat. “And Llyn, don’t forget what we talked about earlier.”
Sure, Master Chief. In my copious fucking spare time.
How long is it likely to be? Rilriltok asked.
O’Mara looked at Cheeirilaq, but apparently Cheeirilaq had remembered its manners and was staring off into space absentmindedly. O’Mara’s big shoulders hunched. “Depends on how fast Linden can get herself back up, and whether Dr. Zhiruo’s colleagues can intervene and get her and Afar cleaned up and rebooted.”
“Nobody has had much luck with Afar yet,” Tsosie said.
Tralgar’s tentacles writhed in what might have been distress, irritation, or deep thought. The translation was not clear. We know more now. And we know how the damage to Afar’s crew was done. I have been in
