I fed the Overseer a rapid-fire series of queries to collect all the data I could from the months David had been on Parthenope. He would hardly be the first Parthenope employee to pad their income with a bit of data theft or extortion or some other criminal endeavor. I set the Overseer to analyzing everything it would give me. I only had twenty-four hours of visual and audio recordings, but surveillance wasn’t the only way to learn something. Employee ID tracking data. Terminal usage. Data request logs. Active work time and inactive downtime. Internal and external communications. It was a huge amount of data, far more than I could ever hope to go over, and it would take even a machine as powerful as the Overseer a little chunk of time to process. I wanted to look for patterns in David’s behavior: who he spoke to in public areas, who he met in private quarters, who he communicated with off-station, how often, about what, and whether those were even real people. Where he spent most of his time and where he went only rarely. What he did when he was alone.
I added another query: a pattern-recognition query on all of David’s communications, personal and professional, for the entire time he had been on Nimue. I told it to search for anything to do with Symposium, Black Halo, those who had died, those who had survived. For news reports about Karl Longo and his sentencing. For messages he had sent to anybody else that fell outside his normal pattern of behavior. Questions he asked, answers he received.
And anything he might have said or searched or discovered about his fellow crew members. Anything. Everything. I wanted to see all of it. We had missed Kristin Herd before, and scores of people had died. David had not been responsible for that, not to the same extent I had been, but I knew he would not have forgotten. He would be ever aware that those sitting next to him in the mess, working beside him on every shift, sharing tools, swapping stories, were not to be trusted.
While the AI was chewing on that, I watched the surveillance of David’s last day.
Twelve months with Parthenope Security and I had grown used to watching people do all manner of things in every imaginable place. People who lived under constant surveillance either forgot or stopped caring that they were being watched at all times. The only supposed privacy Parthenope employees had was in their personal quarters, but even then the company had a record of everybody who went in and out. On a normal day I spent my working hours watching drug deals, physical fights, clumsy threats, embarrassingly bad attempts at extortion, far too many sexual encounters, and more than a few incidents that were some inexplicable combination of all those things.
This was different. This felt like standing outside myself— the person I had become, uniform and security access and prosthetic limbs I couldn’t pay for and all—and looking back across the divide between this hollow simulacrum of a life and my real life, the one I had lost, because that was where David belonged. That was where he lived and breathed and thrived, on the other side of that invisible curtain. It made my chest ache to watch him move through his last day, to see him so settled into the depressing reality we were never meant to endure. It made my skin feel dirty, my throat tight. I did not want to be there.
I watched anyway. I would not let myself turn away.
David worked in Ops for most of the day. He was there at 0917 when the data transfer from Hygiea arrived with the superoperational command packet. He implemented the changes. He went on to other tasks. The other sysadmin, Mary Ping, was in and out of their shared workspace in the room next to this one; they spoke about work when they spoke at all. It was a quiet day. David left Ops to eat lunch in the mess, and afterward he went to his quarters for a few minutes. When he returned to Ops, he uploaded an encrypted file from his PD.
That had to be the message for me. It didn’t look like a video comm; David had disguised it as an operations report. There was no trace of it in the system anymore. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I would have never known it existed. He had recorded it a few hours after he arranged for the surveillance blackout.
After he left Ops in the evening, David returned to the mess. He spoke with a few crew members during the meal. The conversation was perfectly mundane. Complaints about the workday. Complaints about the company. Plans to watch a media serial that evening—apparently Rachel Returned was in its fifth series and the main character was finally about to land on New Earth. More complaints about work. More complaints about the company. There had been a snag in calculating holiday travel time; HR was dragging its feet.
After the meal was finished, the crew drifted away from the mess. Some back to work, some to their quarters, some to the other side of the common room to exercise or watch Rachel discover a new world, same as the old world. David headed into his private quarters. He was in his bunk for about twenty minutes before Mary Ping approached his door. She stepped into David’s room, out of sight and sound of the surveillance system. They both emerged a couple of minutes later.
Ping touched David’s arm, smiled, and said, “I owe you one.”
David answered, “No problem.”
She retreated to her own quarters; David returned to Ops.
I checked the crew roster. As Sigrah had said, Ping had been
