Physically, perhaps – but she knew more than any of them how deep the mental scars reached. The Ellici and Tilliana she’d known were gone forever now.
She backed out of the room, saying nothing as the door slid shut again.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tilliana said. ‘It was too much for her. The waiting, the emptiness. They broke her.’
‘I understand.’ Yirella faced her old friend. ‘What about the other tactical stations, the other squads? Are you in contact with any of them?’
‘No. Every way in and out of this part of the ship has time boundaries.’
‘Okay. I want you to sit tight. I’ll do what I came here for.’
‘Oh. Why are you here?’
‘To fix this. It might take me a while, but I’ll be back, I promise.’
She helped Tilliana back to her cabin, then pulled up a status display from the worn-out sub-network. Good news and bad news; there was plenty of processing capacity and a decent reserve in the power cells. The negative energy conduits on the fuselage remained functional; they just needed operating instructions.
What she still didn’t have was a working initiator. There were three on deck twenty-two, but the sub-network didn’t extend there. It was on a different time flow. She ran an inventory check for remotes and found three cargo trolleys available. Two worked.
A minute later she was in a different stairwell shaft, sitting on the trolley as it clamped itself to the central column. Looking down past her dangling feet, sight switched to infrared, she saw the billowing air currents scudding about at what appeared to be a slower rate. She ordered the trolley to rise at maximum speed so she’d get through the gradient as quickly as possible.
This time the discontinuity didn’t seem so bad. She wondered if deck twenty-two had a slow or fast time flow.
The lights were in standby mode, giving off a dim green glow. And there was something wrong with the air; it carried a musty scent. Her infrared vision showed her the grilles were barely pumping out any fresh air at all. Another standby mode.
She connected to the sub-net and reviewed the logs. The nodes had been isolated from the network for sixty-three years. So, slower than the section incarcerating Tilliana and Ellici, but still fast compared to the one she’d started in. The gradient would be enough to kill a biological body trying to cross over.
When she reviewed the log data, she saw the sub-net had waited for a year, during which there had been no power demand from any equipment. The atmosphere had remained unchanged with no carbon dioxide to scrub; no doors had opened; no movement was detected. The management routine had put everything into full stasis mode and waited for further instructions.
Yirella provided them.
The engineering compartment was already brightly lit, with fresh air blowing hard out of the grilles when she arrived. The three cylindrical initiators were running internal pre-commencement checks. Yirella connected to their management arrays and loaded in the android design, then began to modify it. Some raw material simply wasn’t available, so she verified substitutions. After that there was Ainsley’s unnecessary anatomical fixation to . . . smooth over. Also, if this was her first shaky step elevating to corpus, the new androids shouldn’t have Ainsley’s profile.
Once the design was finalized, she activated the initiators. Fabrication took eight hours. One of the initiators glitched halfway through the procedure – when she opened the cylinder’s lid it looked like a burned corpse was inside – but the remaining pair kept working.
Five days later they’d produced thirty androids of herself. It was a strange sensation when each of the new aspects came online and started sharing her thought routines. She could feel her awareness expand as her mind acquired additional processing capacity – which wasn’t quite the equivalent of a greater intellect, but certainly helped problem solving – in particular, quantifying the negative energy patterns that the Morgan’s conduits would have to direct. With that determined – in theory – she set about formatting the routines to load. The new androids also came equipped with a quantum logic clock, accurate enough for her to synchronize the channel activation across differing time flows.
She dispatched twenty of them across the ship, with two primary missions. The first was to make contact with any other surviving tactical teams, while the second was to track down working initiators that could build more of herselves. The Morgan’s sleek conical profile was five kilometres long, which she estimated would now be subject to at least two hundred and fifty different time flows. At least the androids didn’t need spacesuits to move through the sections in a vacuum, so they should be able to position themselves evenly throughout the ship.
Two of them remained with the initiators to keep on producing more aspects. Eight accompanied the Ainsley android aspect back to the deck where Tilliana and Ellici lived, where four stayed, providing companionship and practical help to her two friends. The remaining four went back with the Ainsley android to where the original Yirella was waiting . . .
*
. . . She swayed about as if caught in a blast of wind, the experience of living so much in the space of seconds almost taking her to her knees. ‘Fuck the Saints,’ she moaned. But at the end, all she could see was Ellici and Tilliana – her smart, funny friends reduced to age-ruined shadows of the amazing people they used to be.
When she blinked the sticky moisture out of her eyes, she saw her own mournful expression on the Ainsley android’s face. The rest of the knowledge it had brought back was sloshing about inside her head like storm waves hitting a rocky shore. ‘The conduits?’
‘We’ll activate them in another three minutes,’ the Ainsley android said.
Of course. The memory was there; she just had to concentrate. If those first twenty androids she’d sent into the ship had
