“We’ve done that before.”
“Yes, we have. You’ll still be in your cabin, your safe place. And you know that if you aren’t happy at any point you can just come right back, and the man will go back outside and the door will be locked up, just like that.”
“OK.”
Zane 3 sounded passive rather than convinced. He was so malleable, so lacking in self-motivation, it was extraordinarily hard not to direct him. “Thanks, Zane. I’ll speak to you later.”
Wetherbee knew he had a few minutes before the alter communicated with him. He murmured to the camera overhead, “Wetherbee medical log, 30th June 2048. With Zane Glemp. I believe I’ve been communicating with the alter I call Zane 3, the alter that first presented. I expect to be talking in a moment to the alter known as Jerry, the older man. For the record it’s three days since I last repeated the appropriate structured clinical interview as recommended by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, 2015 edition; I still uphold my diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder-”
“Hi, Dr. Wetherbee.” Zane was smiling, his eyes open; he was looking around curiously. Everything about his body posture was changed. He looked alert, inquisitive, confident, not passive. His accent was faintly middle European.
“Hello. Who am I speaking to?”
“Well, this is Jerry, but I think you guessed that. How are you?”
“Very well.”
“And how’s the fake mission going? Still happy with your Las Vegas hotel?”
Jerry actively mocked Zane 3’s suspicions that the whole mission was unreal, a fake mounted on Earth. “Not enough ice with the room service champagne.”
Jerry laughed. He liked it if you played along with him, treated him as a peer.
“You’ve been busy, Jerry.” Wetherbee held up his handheld. “You seem to be running Wilson Argent’s election campaign for him.”
“Well, I guess I am. That’s why I exist, you know, to work. Zane spun me off because he needs organizing skills, which is what I contribute, and I come out to take over when things get on top of him and he can’t cope. But Zane’s life is pretty small scale. I have time to do other things.” He winked at Wetherbee. “Wilson knows I’m just an alter. Oh, he wouldn’t put it like that… When he asks Zane a question to do with me, and Zane can’t remember the previous conversation, Wilson just smiles and backs off and waits until I can come out to talk to him. He doesn’t know the medical stuff, but he has an intuitive understanding of people, I think. Even of us!” He laughed.
“Maybe that will make him a good speaker.”
“Well, I think so,” “Jerry” said. “You decided which way you’re going to vote yet, Doc?”
“I’m still considering. I’m impressed that you put out a manifesto.” He scrolled through it now on the handheld. “You caught the other candidates on the hop with this.”
“Nothing wrong with being professional. We put a lot of thought into the proposals in there, especially the bill of rights.”
“I see that.” This was a document, still in draft form, that would assure the crew of what Wilson called fundamental human rights. This included the right to the basics of life, to free air and water-a right you wouldn’t have to spell out on Earth, but in a ship like this where every cubic centimeter of air had to be supplied by a machine that somebody else maintained, it wasn’t a given. “Alongside our rights, you also spell out our responsibilities. Maintaining the ship’s systems, not threatening its integrity. I see you’re planning to introduce a credit system.”
“Hell, yes.” He smiled. “That’s one of mine. We need basic incentivization. Do more good work and you accumulate wealth, you can buy stuff from other people, and your status goes up. Simple human nature. We have to move away from the vague socialist stuff Kelly spouted. This isn’t a kibbutz. We’re all Americans, for God’s sake.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, mostly. No offense. Oh, some of the stuff in Ship’s Law can stand. We figured most of it out by precedent, after all, and much of it is fit for purpose. But we need clearer thinking about the rest.”
“Such as, you specify here, the freedom to marry who you choose, to have babies with who you choose.”
“Yeah. We’re restoring the right of each woman to control her own body, her womb.”
“But this flies against what the social engineers recommended for optimal genetic mixing. That was a basic requirement of the mission.”
“The social engineers aren’t here,” Jerry said firmly. “We are. And no policy is going to fly if it’s rejected by the people, no matter how smart those long-drowned guys who thought it up were. My own and Wilson’s belief is that we should put our trust in the collective wisdom of the crew-of us.”
“You’re proposing education reform too.”
“Certainly. The curriculum we’ve developed for the kids so far has been based on wishy-washy stuff from the Academy. Ethics, for God’s sake. Philosophy. Comparative theology. Blah, blah, blah. Thank God none of the kids are old enough yet to have been too damaged by this stuff. We should stick to what these kids are going to need to learn in order to survive.”
“Such as, don’t dismantle the life support? You’re even restricting the science they’ll be taught. Usually in a school you’d reward curiosity, initiative, an ability to learn.”
“This mission is all about balances. Curiosity can come later, when we’re safely established on Earth II, and we have the luxury to wonder what’s over the next hill.”
“Hmm. Interesting experiment.”
Zane smiled. “In time basic human nature will reassert itself. But that time isn’t now. For now, we have to consider ourselves at war with an environment that will kill us unless we manage to maintain our defenses, without a single waver of concentration. And that’s the message we have to hammer home to the kids.”
“You assert we have rights concerning a supply of air and water. But that hands a lot of power to the central functions that maintain those resources.”
“Sure. Which is why Wilson is courting Holle Groundwater, getting her on his side, as I’m sure you already know. Because that kind of power resides with her and her team.”
Wetherbee came to the most controversial piece of proposed legislation. “You’re going to stop in-hull surveillance, the routine recording of everything that goes on.”
“Unless it’s for a specific purpose-yes. Humans have a basic right to privacy, of thought and deed. We need to trust our people, Doctor.”
“Thomas Windrup-”
“Was a one-off. And besides the surveillance didn’t stop him, it just proved his guilt when he’d already committed his crime, been caught, and confessed.” He laughed. “Of course Zane 3 thinks that if we pull the plug on the reality show, the controllers in Las Vegas will come in and shut us down, or punish us.”
“You know there’s a lot of debate over this. The crew will have no means of surveilling you, I mean Wilson and his team.”
“Oh, that’s just a theoretical quibble.”
“Theoretical? Maybe.” Wetherbee pressed his fingers to his lips, wondering how far he should take this discussion. His concern was Zane, not Wilson and his manifesto. His long-term goal was the reintegration of all Zane’s partial personalities. But to achieve that he was going to have to understand and work with each of them. He said carefully, “Kelly Kenzie is openly calling this a coup.”
Zane laughed. “Well, she would.” He actually winked at Wetherbee. “Listen, Doc-I think you and I can talk freely. I mean, you’re under no threat no matter who wins out on Friday. You can look at this on a number of levels. The social engineers tried to set up our little ship-based society the way the hunter-gatherer bands used to organize. There you have leaders on sufferance, their most important quality being prestige-ability. That’s Kelly all over, isn’t it? But Wilson looks ahead to tougher times-times like now, times when we came close to being destroyed by our unrelenting enemy the environment. At such times you need a more basic kind of leader.”