HMCSS Montreal
Earth orbit
I wake early, ship's time, alone in my bunk and wearing the kind of bad attitude that makes you hate living in your own skin. I know what it's about, too. I haven't had a drink since we left Earth, and I've been a borderline alcoholic for twenty years. Self-medication is a wonderful thing.
You don't need it anymore, Jenny. Yeah, right.
So I can sleep nights, when two months ago I couldn't. Somebody loves me and isn't shy about showing it. My monsters are all dead now. Dead and buried. Lost and gone.
So why am I waking up mornings wanting a drink? Or thinking about the vial of diminutive yellow pills in my blazer pocket?
Oh, hell. Today is another test-drive day. I get to jack into the Montreal live and for real, take her up and out, and put her through her FTL paces. Not the virtual reality simulator, like the one Leah is probably flying right now, somewhere on Earth. Not a model. A real, live, deadly powerful ship with some three hundred souls on board.
I roll over out of the bunk, hit the floor palms flat, and start my push-ups. Endorphins. Good thing. One, two, three, four, nose dipping down to almost touch the porthole in my floor, nothing out there now but the trackless dark—
The trick is not using the prosthesis. It's too strong. Fortunately, in partial gravity, one-handed push-ups aren't as hard as they are planet-side. Get the blood moving. Good morning, Richard. Any progress?
“Yes,” he says. “And it's complicated in here. I'm not certain there's any differentiation between the worm and the programming.”
I stop with my right arm extended, left arm folded against my chest. Even the new prosthesis is heavy, although it's lighter and stronger than the twenty-five-year-old one it replaced. If I didn't keep up with my PT, I'd look like the Hunchback just from carrying the damned thing around. “No differentiation?” I say it out loud, and bite my lip. Richard, what does that mean?
His image drums fingers on immaterial thighs, then the hands come up in an encompassing gesture. I imagine a sailor pulling ropes. “It means there's no worm, per se. Nothing I can deactivate without ripping the programming out entirely. And you need it where it is. It was skillfully done. But if I could decompile the code, Castaign and I might have a chance.”
That software runs the wetware that keeps me walking. Nanoprocessors along my damaged spinal cord, improving its functionality; the reflex boost that makes me potentially able to steer this improbable starship. My left hand, gleaming steel under a polymer film that handles the sensory information. All souvenirs of a very, very bad accident half a lifetime ago, upgraded and enhanced with new, radical nanotechnology that cost me a few weeks on tubes and monitors in a hospital bed.
There's a rub. The source of that medical miracle is the grounded alien spacecraft that Valens and Charlie discovered on Mars. The technology that also gave us the Montreal's quasi-understood stardrive and my ability to control it. Technology we've back-engineered, or at least copied… but that, in my layman's estimation, we don't understand worth a damn.
It's beyond irresponsible and into criminal. So how did I come to sign on for this little charade?
Thereby hangs the tale—
“I'm working on it, Jenny,” Richard says in my ear, as I realize I've lost count of my push-ups and ease back onto my knees to stretch.
The worm, or the tech?
“Yes.” Expansive, expressive hands. Long knotty fingers, with no physical reality whatsoever. Richard is made in the image of a physicist dead since the previous century. He's not Richard Feynman — just an artificial persona, a program meant to mimic the original. A persona that somehow clicked into self-awareness; a feat my friend Elspeth hasn't been able to reproduce. “I've got a few ideas on how the stardrive works. It has to be ducking the Einsteinian speed limit somehow. Superstrings, probably—” he rattles on, sketching diagrams in space. They hang glowing between his fingers; the joys of VR.
Man's got a gift. My eyes don't quite glaze over when he starts talking about eleven-dimensional reality. Dick, the worm.
“It's not a worm.”
Whatever. What does it do?
His face rearranges itself around a tangled smile. “I'm going to have to block-redirect part of it before I get out of your head. It logs brain activity, for one thing.”
Thought police? Damn.
“Not exactly. But I was using up a hell of a lot of your processing capability when I was living in your head, and it will pick that up, so I need to fake some logs. Here's the coolest thing — the surgical nanites are still active in your system. Still laying networks to help you interface with the Montreal. And VR linkages. Have you noticed my voice and image getting stronger? There's more room in here every day.”
I thought that was practice. Great. I'm full of bugs.
“You're full of bugs that are still repairing all the old scar tissue and neural damage. Jenny. It's radical—”
What?
“You might get smarter. Even more interesting—”
I catch myself holding my breath. I wonder how much of this Valens knew before he shot me full of these things. Koske is wearing them, too, though. As were the pilots killed in Le Québec, the Li Bo, the Lao Zi. Interesting, Dick? We're talking about my brain.
“Sorry, Jen. Organic repair is continuing. You had some liver damage, some age-appropriate arthritis in addition to all the scardown and trauma around your implants, artificial joints, and prostheses. And did you happen to notice that half the Montreal is sick?”
He's nattering. “I noticed Gabe and Valens both wiping their noses.” And I've never felt better. Who have always been able to catch a cold by looking at a sick person across an empty room. Richard, the scardown was supposed to reverse. Look. I can touch my toes. Haven't been able to do that since I was twenty-four. Damned ceramic hip was always too stiff.
“Yes. Supposed to reverse. So was the neural damage, the demyelination, the flashbacks and the seizures, the symptoms of MS. How about the liver and kidney damage? Was that supposed to reverse, too?”
Something chill settles between my shoulder blades. Liver damage… Richard? What are you telling me?
“Not enough evidence yet to know, Jenny. But you're getting healthier. And I checked. Koske hasn't been on sick call since he went through the procedure, and he was a lot worse off than you were. He had the induced-Asperger syndrome symptoms you mostly ducked, in spades. In fact, he still does.”
“Holy hell.” I think about Earth, the unforgettable blue-white sweep of her face seen from the panorama lounge on Clarke Station. Starving, fevered Earth — brutal winters and searing summers since the shutdown of the global thermohaline conveyor, the cold Atlantic rising along river valleys and pressing dikes. New Orleans floating on barges, Houston abandoned to the sea. I think of Gabe's daughter Genie and her thick, choking cough. And maybe I feel a little pity for Trevor Koske, after all.
Dick. You're trying to tell me I'm not getting any older. That the ship tree—Charlie Forster's word—nanites are actually healing more than just the scar tissue and the neural issues.
“That's what the evidence suggests. Yes.”
Is this going to affect Leah?