Misjump Page 9

  “Seconds,” replied Meilin. She started typing commands and cursed in Chinese. “I have uploaded it, but there were warnings. I am chasing them down.”

  The AI display froze for a moment and then refreshed. The scavenging number dropped to zero, but the activity around the implant resumed immediately. Brain activity had briefly fallen to normal levels while the AI reset. “The AI is driving her brain. Any idea why?” asked Lori.

  “A new AI is always curious,” said Meilin, eyes scanning some kind of structured file. She made a small edit and saved the file. “Re-uploading.”

  The AI display did not reset. The cell death reading on the surgical unit screen continued to drop. Brain activity remained impossibly high. Lori moved from screen to screen, trying to make some sense of what she was seeing. Body temperature was approaching normal now, and Fumi’s face was looking pale rather than corpse grey. Her eyes continued to move under her eyelids. There were slight movements in her limbs, not those of a sleeper, but definitely signs of life. Suddenly her chest rose in response to the rising CO2 levels and Fumi took a breath and then another. She stirred and then moaned, alarms sounding at the same time.

  Lori dashed back to the monitor, knocking Gregor out of the way. Vitals looked fine, remarkably so. Cell deaths were spiking, much higher than before. Lori started switching between windows, trying to find the source of the problem. She half heard Gregor reporting that the nanite power drain was rising sharply and approaching the supply limits. Lori passed by the window that she needed and flicked back. Blood chemistry was off, way off. She wondered if it could be the nanites, but the figures that were worst by far were the same ones as before they had started. “Gregor, I think that we have a battery leak again. Worse, much worse.”

  Gregor straightened reached into the surgical berth, slipping his hand under Fumi’s right shoulder blade, reaching for her spine. “Hot,” he said. Gregor felt for the rectangular shape of the battery that he had implanted. The shape that he found was irregular, partially deflated. “Battery burst, left side, maybe right is good, maybe not,” he said.

  Lori stood up and reached for the instruments that she had prepared, hoping not to need them. “Flip her over, Gregor. Quick rather than gentle. Now!” Gregor rolled Fumi over and she came to rest canted with her front to the corner of the box. “Good enough,” said Lori and reached past Gregor with a surgical blade. She started an incision using the scar from the previous procedure as a guide. The incision seemed to go well, but Lori realised that she had cut too shallowly. She went back to the start of the incision and realised that it was healing in front of her eyes. “Meilin, shut down the nanites. I need to make an incision.” She heard typing and tried again, but the wound closed even faster this time. “Meilin, I need you to shut off the nanites now.”

  “I am trying, I am trying,” sobbed Meilin, the illusion of calm lost. “The AI is not responding. I am locked out of the admin interface.

  Gregor started to speak. “I can kill the power to the—”

  “BEEP-BEEP-BEEEEEP.” They all had enough training to recognise that sound. Cardiac arrest warning.

  “Flip her over!” shouted Lori to Gregor, who stood inches away. “Apply chest compressions.” Gregor bent to the task while Lori grabbed a hypospray and loaded an ampoule of adrenaline. She would have used a direct shot to the heart if she could, but the ship was only equipped for so much work. She pressed the spray against Fumi’s chest below one small breast and squeezed the trigger home while Gregor pumped down with as much force as he could manage at such an awkward angle. Lori heard the crack of ribs and grimaced. She knew to expect it from her days in ER, but it was never a good sound. Lori needed to see what Fumi’s heart was doing, but half the sensors had come off with the rough handling. She checked the console anyway. Flatline. There were enough leads in place to pick up something if there was any electrical signal at all. That wasn’t shockable and there was nothing much that she could do. Gregor was keeping up chest compressions, and she could spell him when he got tired, but she couldn’t think of anything that more that she could do with what little she had to hand. The neural activity was still an insane mess of spikes. The blood chemistry was showing error readings where the monitor was not accepting the values that it was getting. Pulse was zero and oxygen saturation was dropping. Body temperature was rising dangerously high. Suddenly the brain activity screen went to zero activity across all bands. That was … she was too tired for this. Brain activity didn’t end abruptly. A body died slowly and there would still be some activity even minutes after death.

  Gregor paused and then continued. “She has gone floppy,” he said, his tone flat. All feeds on the monitor showed flat lines, impossibly soon after an arrest.

  Lori struggled to find her next action and failed. There was no protocol for this. She checked the connections for the EEG, trying to get a signal that she was sure wasn’t there. She looked again at the diagnostic displays, took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “I am sorry, so sorry. I am calling it. Ten forty-three ship’s time, Fumi Takahashi died. You can stop, Gregor. We have done all that we can.”

  Gregor stopped, looking down with tears rolling down his cheeks. Meilin sobbed as she typed, still trying to shut down the AI. Lori felt as if she had been beaten up, used up and wrung out. She would do what was necessary for Fumi, but she needed a moment.

  It was just then that the ship screamed, somehow metallic and human at the same time.

  Chapter 10

  The scream modulated oddly becoming more human as it continued … and then less human again. A person would have needed to breathe.

  Jax and Ivo rushed into the room and looked at Gregor, Lori, and Meilin. Gregor held up his hand and answered the question before they asked it. “No fucking idea. Sit down, shut up.” They looked around for chairs but there were none unused in the room, so they sat on the floor, backs to the wall. Meilin stopped typing as the system was not responding at all.

  The scream continued for minutes longer and then stopped abruptly. Jumbled syllables came from the speakers, repeating in part, becoming less distorted. They resolved into “Okaa-san Okaa-san Okaa-san” being repeated at different speeds. Gregor looked at Meilin. “Japanese?”

  Meilin nodded. “Yes, a common word. Mother. She is calling for her mother.” Meilin was still wearing the mask, the fabric now soaked with tears.

  “Fumi,” called Lori. “Can you hear me? Fumi?” She repeated herself several times.

  The voice coming out of the speakers changed, somehow less panicked but still speaking in rapid Japanese. Gregor looked over to Meilin, but she shook her head. She only knew a few words of that language and these were too fast to understand.

  “English, please, if you can, Fumi. You are speaking Japanese and we don’t understand you,” said Lori addressing the air in the room awkwardly.

  “Where am I? I can’t feel anything. I can’t see anything. What has happened? Was there a cold sleep accident?”

  The words had Fumi’s accent, but the pitch and speed of the words varied oddly.

  Lori hesitated. “Yes, there was a bad misjump and we were all in trouble, but the worst is over, I think. How do you feel?” Lori rarely used a bedside manner and it showed.

  “I don’t hurt. I don’t feel cold. I am a little hungry. I can’t feel anything or see anything or hear anything except you. Where am I?” asked Fumi. The pacing of the words was better, the sound more human.

  Lori looked at the display on the surgical capsule. The brain activity was still completely flat. She paused. “The ship is back on Neuholme. We are all on the ship,” Lori answered.

  “Well, okay, that is good, I guess. Why can’t I see anything? Am I still in the capsule? My implant isn’t working at all.” Fumi’s voice raised at the end.

  Lori wished that she could have this conversation alone. She gestured at the others to leave. They could probably hear Fumi’s responses from anywhere on the ship, but Lori would feel less self-conscio
us if she could talk to Fumi without anyone else in the room. “Just let me get a coffee and I will explain, I promise. Just give me a moment please,” she said. The others left quietly as she fixed herself a cup of strong sweet coffee. She would have liked something in it, but she had work to do.

  “So, Fumi, I want to start with the good news. There is a lot of good news and one bit of bad news, but let’s start with the good stuff. I am pretty sure that you are never going to be ill again, and you are probably going to outlast everyone here. I think that you are going to have a lot of unique advantages.”

  “Quit the soft soap. What is the bad news? Am I a paraplegic or something? Am I going to need more implants just to walk?” asked Fumi, her tone harsh.

  Lori took a deep draw on her coffee. “Well, that is a difficult question to answer. You see, you seem to have become an AI after your body died.”

  The screaming could be heard throughout the ship. It sounded much more human this time. No-one found this to be an improvement.

  Chapter 11

  The Sarafina sat on the concrete pad at the spaceport, almost as grey as the ground in the cold rain. The crew stood around a short trench a little distance from the ship. It was a strange funeral in that the deceased was also one of the mourners. They would have chosen a nicer spot for the grave, but Fumi only had control of the ship’s cameras and wanted to watch. The Sarafina had not carried a coffin and so Lori had wrapped her friend’s corpse in blankets, tied around with a cord. Fumi had not been a large woman in life, and the grave was more than big enough. She had remarked to Lori that despite watching her weight, she had ended up weighing a little over sixty tonnes. The doctor had considered the comment to be a good sign.

  Each of the crew tossed a little rubble onto the wrapped bundle. Fumi spoke via the ship’s speakers. “One for me too, please.” Gregor nodded sadly and threw a handful of gravel down over her body. They all stood around the hole in the landing pad with heads bowed, alone in their thoughts. Music played over the speakers, an instrumental in a minor key played on a koto. The drizzle picked up as the song finished and the remaining crew started to push the concrete back into the hole, their movements somehow embarrassed.

  After the funeral, Fumi wanted some time alone. She felt sad and confused, but at a level removed. Her body was emulated but it felt real to her. It had been painful in the first few hours. Her stomach was telling her that she was hungry, but there was no food in the abstraction that was the AI system. She had tasked the AI with making some boiled rice since it was simple. The resultant object had only an abstract existence to her, and she could only interact with its program, which didn’t fill her stomach. She had created a simple VR environment for herself: a blue cube with a blocky table and a space for her to stand. There had already been VR software in the ship’s catalogue, but it didn’t have a library of objects. She was lucky that the software was there at all. The light in the room was flat and the depth representation was subtly wrong. However, it was somewhere to be. She imported the AI-modelled rice into the VR and looked at it. The pieces were about the right shape for rice but looked as if they were made from plastic. She hesitantly took some of the grains in her hand and noticed that they didn’t clump the way that rice did. They lacked all scent, not even having the slight boiled rice smell. She tipped her hand into her mouth, the grains falling in. There was no real taste and only a suggestion of texture, more like mashed potato than rice, but it wasn’t unpleasant, just bland. She would work on better options later. She would also need to create some clothes. The nanites had faithfully scanned her body and replicated it in simulation, but there had been no clothes to scan even if had they wanted to. You had to be down to skin to use the low berths.

  Her control over the ship was partial at best. The AI had patched her into the in-ship comms system very early after her failed revival, but she had relied on the AI for control. She added a few of the more useful control screens to the walls of her cube and looked around. The screens seemed to add some texture, making the environment a little more real somehow. She was able to control some real-world elements of the ship using the monitors and the virtual keyboards that were projected from them. None of the things that she could change affected her directly, but they were somehow an anchor to the physical world. That seemed important in ways that she couldn’t define. She wanted to mourn. Her crew were mourning her while she was still there. Her body was missing but not to her; it felt like everything else was gone. She had no idea how to mourn for the loss of everything. Even the lifeless planet fitted her image of a universe taken away. She would focus on something small and definite and achievable. She looked down at herself. Either a chair or some clothes. No-one could see her, yet it felt wrong to be naked all the time. Baby steps, that was the way. Fumi wiped away a tear and closed her eyes for a moment. Clothes first, she decided. A kimono was basically a tube. How hard could that be to code?

  Gregor changed into a dry ship suit, putting the old one in the basket. It was crusted with concrete dust that the rain had made into grey mud. He hated funerals and always had. The funeral of a shipmate was always the worst. It had been bad enough on the naval ships where there was a good chance that he barely knew whoever had died. On a vessel like this, it was more like losing a family member. He pulled a bottle out of a drawer and poured a shot, the liquid oily but clear. He tossed the contents of the glass down in a single swallow, holding in place while it burned down his throat. The liquor was ship made rotgut, genuinely navy bootleg. He drank it at times like these because of tradition. Very few people drank it for the taste. He would ask Meilin to pack up Fumi’s stuff. That felt more appropriate than a man pawing through her effects. For the first time ever, he had to consider what the deceased actually wanted rather than what they would have wanted. That was going to take a lot of getting used to. He didn’t know if he could think of the virtual being as Fumi, but maybe all that mattered was that she felt that she was still a person, still Fumi. He realised that his logic wasn’t too clear. He poured another shot and decided to see if it came back into focus after another drink.

  Lori showered, rubbing her hands over her bare scalp, massaging it with her fingers. Her head hurt, and she didn’t need her medical training to recognise a stress headache when she felt one. She wanted some time with an escapist book and some mud-thick hot chocolate, ideally with some churros. The medical bay needed a proper reorganisation and a deep clean, but she would start that in the morning. For now, she wanted some “me” time. She shut off the water and reached for a towel, burying her face in the rough cloth. The walls of her cabin were studded with infrared emitters and she dialled them up, letting the heat dry her dark skin as she stood in the middle of the small room and basked. The surgery and the funeral had taken a lot out of her and it was time for a little self-care. Physician, heal thyself, she thought.

  Jax grunted as he completed the fiftieth repetition of biceps curls. He paused and then tried for another, his arms shaking as he made it. He worked for one more but couldn’t make it. He gave himself a second and then reached over to the control panel, changing the configuration of the tiny gym. Some squats would help tire him out and let him get some sleep. It had been a rough few days and he didn’t want to dream.

  Meilin adjusted the position of the piece, a rayed cup that reminded her of a flower. It should work with the spiral that reached up from the holographic projection piece but somehow it didn’t. The composition didn’t work, and she couldn’t feel why. She reloaded the design from the file and the spiral stood bare once again. She wanted to capture the feeling inside her head, but she couldn’t find its 3D representation yet. Sadness but with hope and fear, mourning for a world now empty, the loss and yet not loss of her friend, the distance from home … She thought of Fumi and half smiled. Tough Fumi, taking everything on and never letting anyone know that it bothered her, jacked into the AI and playing her odd abstract games with it. Meilin liked Fumi, but she was never sure how well she knew her fri
end. She would be even harder to know in her new form. Meilin looked at the spiral, too bare and empty to represent what she was feeling. On an impulse, she adjusted the controls and then followed the spiral with a swoop of her hand, dropping cherry blossom from her fingers. She looked at the piece. It was all wrong, not at all what she had in her head. It was also utterly perfect. She saved the design and turned to her bed. She would sleep on it.

  Ivo slipped the translucent square under his tongue and let it dissolve. It had a salty, soapy taste which he had never cared for. The saliva slowly filled his mouth and he sloshed it around, making sure that the lining of his cheeks were coated. Little by little, the warmth filled him and he felt the edges of the day recede. He didn’t have many of the Dreamies left, and he had no idea when he would get some more, but he felt that he had earned this one. Finally, he swallowed and let the relaxation wash over him. He hoped that he would dream of his family again, the ones that had only ever existed in these dreams. He missed them. He relaxed into the bed, squirming his head against the pillow and letting sleep take him. He was already smiling.

  Fumi looked down at herself, the kimono shapeless and plain. It was a start. It moved when she did and she felt less vulnerable with something to wear even though it was as insubstantial as … well, as the rest of her. There was a great deal more to do, but she was tired. She knew intellectually that her body didn’t need sleep. It was not as if it were still with her. The model of her body did though and that felt just the same. She was too tired to make a bed, but she could sleep on the table, she supposed. She would work on a better solution in the morning. She climbed on to the table and curled into a foetal position. “Lights!” she said. The AI worked out what she meant, and the room dimmed, lit only by the monitors hanging in front of the walls. The tears started again, and she cried wordlessly for reasons that she couldn’t explain. Eventually, sleep came, and the tears stopped. She was so tired.