The door handle turns as the technician comes to join me. I sit at a desk, using the inadequate VR of the prosthetic eye instead of the full wetwired interface at the back of my neck, and log myself in. Even with the focusing potential of the drug, the simulated ship and its responses seem a thousand times slower than the real thing.
9:00 AM
Monday 20 November, 2062
National Defence Medical Center
Toronto, Ontario
Leah squeezed her dad's hand one last time before she sat down in the chair and let the doctor wheel her down the corridor, leaving her father alone with Aunt Jenny. She tried not to think about the funny narrow feeling in the pit of her stomach, or the funny metal taste in the back of her mouth, and concentrated on enjoying the totally unnecessary wheelchair ride. “So what do we do now, Dr. Valens?”
He leaned forward over her shoulder as he pushed. “Well, you get to share a room with my granddaughter Patty. We'll get you settled in and I'm going to bring you something to drink. It's the nanite broth.”
“What does it taste like?”
“Really nasty lemonade.” She heard his grin as he opened the door to a hospital room that was pleasanter than she expected, with gingham curtains and even an area rug between the twin beds. A tall, muscular-looking brunette girl in green surgical scrubs sat cross-legged on the one beside the window, playing a holographic game that involved assembling falling geometric shapes into patterns before they reached the covers. She glanced up long enough to smile and looked back down, her brow creased in concentration.
Valens kept talking as he set the chair's wheel-lock and helped Leah up. “Then we implant two chips. One at the base of your skull, next to your neural-VR interface. The other goes in the back of your hand. Those chips control the nanosurgeons. Leah, this is Patty. Patty, this is Leah. You're the only young women in our test group. I know you'll make us proud.”
“We're going to kick the boys' butts, Papa Fred.”
Leah looked back at the other girl. She'd lost her game, and the holographic shapes spilled out over the bed in a snowdrift, but she was grinning.
“You bet we are,” Leah said. “We're going to fly first!”
1:00 PM
Monday 20 November, 2062
Clarke Orbital Platform Biolabs
Brazilian Beanstalk Terminus
Charlie Forster rubbed enthusiastically at the bald spot he was too vain to get fixed and frowned around his VR contacts. Massive magnification showed him swarming nanobots, scurrying and multiplying in a nutrient-and-metal-rich broth. These were the original beasties, salvaged from the ship tree abandoned on Mars: the many-times-great-grandparents of the neurosurgical bots Valens used to augment his pilots. Charlie spared a thought for the newest of the lot — Master Warrant Officer Casey — and smiled. She was sure a hell of a lot less brittle than the rest of the guys so far. And seemed possessed of an actual personality, too.
He blinked.
She.
“Fucking hell.”
Charlie reached for his interface so fast he fumbled it, and only the autosave kept him from losing a half-hour's worth of nanite data. He held his breath until a familiar voice came over his ear clip. Silver hair resolved in the uplink. Charlie blinked to center a wandering contact. “Valens here.”
“Fred, it's Charlie. Look, I have a wild idea on the old-style neural implant adaptations. Can you pull your old data? Or maybe you can tell me just from memory.” Impatiently, he waited out the brief lag.
“Tell me the question and I'll tell you if I need to look it up.”
“How many in your original group were women?”
A pause that seemed, perhaps, slightly longer than the lag. “I can answer that. Only three. We wanted more — it's my entirely unscientific bias that women are physically tougher and personally more cooperative than men — but women were less likely to sustain the kind of massive trauma we needed to justify the work, and less likely to volunteer when they did.”
Charlie didn't let his flinch show in his eyes. There were noticeably fewer men Valens's and Charlie's age in Canada than there were women. Charlie still had twinges of guilt over not serving, on those occasions when he was reminded that almost everybody else had. “What happened to them?”
“Let's see. You've met Casey, of course. Fazzari came through it almost as well and succumbed to a massive aneurysm about five years back. Ray didn't make it through the surgery. She was the oldest of the original group.”
“None of them showed the hypersensitivity and autism?”
“Casey has it to a limited degree, and so did Fazzari. Casey used to have a lot of problems with brightness and sudden movements, although she learned to compensate. She's hypersensitive to touch and texture as well. When her implants were failing earlier this year, she was having seizure episodes that seemed triggered by flashing lights or adrenaline. She's also prone to a feedback overload from tactile stimulus—” Valens tilted his head, eyes cast sideways, and made a sound that could have been a chuckle, or a cough. “And shame on you for even thinking it, Charlie.” Taut lips skinned back in a sudden grin.
Charlie cleared his throat. He wondered if there were many other people Colonel Valens would unbend enough with to make an off-color joke. “No suicides among the women, though?”
The tiny image of Valens in Charlie's contact lens shrugged. “Three out of 155 isn't a statistically significant sample, Charlie.”
“No.” Charlie polished his bald spot some more, watching the coiling, breeding nanites with about a quarter of his awareness.
“Do you have any theories?”
Charlie shrugged. He stared at the ceiling. He rubbed his hands together. “Well. The female immune system is significantly different than the male. It has to be able to identify friendly aliens and tell them apart from unfriendly ones.”
“Friendly aliens?”
“Sperm,” Charlie said dryly. “Babies. Have you started the implantation process on the first candidates?”
“Two girls,” Valens answered. “Five boys.”
“If you can get more girls into the pilot program, I'd suggest that it's probably a very worthwhile use of resources. Meanwhile, I'll start trying to figure out why.”
“Girls don't play computer games, dammit.”
“Then find better computer games, Fred.”
1:00 AM
Tuesday 21 November, 2062
National Defence Medical Center
Toronto, Ontario
Patricia woke in darkness. She lay still for a moment, feeling the unfamiliar tug of the IV line in the back of her hand; it ran nutrients and trace elements into her bloodstream for the nanosurgeons. A sensation like chewing on tinfoil filled her mouth. “Ick,” she almost said, but then she remembered she wasn't alone in the room. She strained her ears and heard Leah snore softly: more a kitten whimper than an actual rattle.
Familiar midnight tension filled Patty. She turned on her side, pushed the cheap sheets down and stretched, wary of her needle site, and ran through her breath exercises. It didn't help. The pressure behind her breastbone mounted until she imagined it bulging her chest at the center — the need to be doing almost burned.