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 contact with the methane team working on them, and they believe that a surgical intervention is likely to be successful.
“Surgical?” I asked. “What exactly—? How badly are they hurt?”
They need re-etching of the… I suppose the nearest equivalent is circuits—the neural pathways that I now, with this new information, suspect have been affected by the meme. Tralgar stopped itself. I’m getting ahead of myself. Something—probably the toxic meme, by Occam’s razor—infiltrated their foxes and rewrote the neural pathways to lock them into a deep sleep.
I shied away from the idea. It nauseated me. I know we’re all mostly microprocessors made of various substrates and chemicals and electrical impulses—the thing all sentients have in common—and the philosophers love to tell us that free will is an illusion. But the idea that something could just… reach in, and rewrite your brain.
How hideous.
There are so many reasons I decided not to specialize in neurosurgery, and right then I was remembering all of them. At least with my patients it is very difficult for me to make things worse for them, in terms of long-term outcomes, since they’re usually about to die if I don’t do something to help them.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” I said, after due consideration.
O’Mara nodded. “In the meantime, I need to go figure out how to feed a hundred thousand sentients on limited rations for an indeterminate time. I hope somebody on this bubble knows something about hydroponic farming. Or the crystalline ice-creature equivalent.”
Waiting in hospitals is the worst thing. It doesn’t get any better when you’re a doctor with a nonrelevant specialty. Or when the hospital is falling to pieces around you.
I did suit up and go EVA to rescue some staff members stuck in lifts when Linden had powered herself down. Miraculously—or rather, because of Linden’s skill—nobody had been injured, but quite a few people were trapped, and moving them to less claustrophobic environs was work that I was actually trained for. And “suited” for—and I didn’t even need a rescue hardsuit for this. Just a regular easy-to-maneuver softsider.
That killed a few hours usefully, and when I was done I needed a break without too many people around me. I could have gone back to my quarters on the hospital… but I was rattled and anxious and my whole body hurt and I didn’t want to tune to take the edge off it. I wanted to go home.
And home, for the time being, was still Sally.
But as soon as I stepped through the airlock, I heard something banging—like a tool pounded against a bulkhead. And a frantic voice, Loese: “This is bad! This is so bad, this is so bad—”
I was about to cringe my way right back out the airlock again when Sally’s voice interrupted smoothly. “We’ll be back on duty in no time, Loese. Somebody else will cover this call. Nobody will be left out in space because of us— Hello, Llyn. I’m sorry, we’re having a bad dia here.”
Loese shook her head. She had apparently been banging on a stanchion with a ship shoe, which was a pretty self-restrained way to deal with the level of frustration she seemed to be feeling. I mean, it would have been more restrained to have tuned it back a little, but sometimes you want to feel angry.
I held out my arms to her in a question. She sighed, and came to me, and accepted the best motherly hug a terrible mother could muster.