“Yes, I’m fine, thank you!” she blurts. “Agh!” Her suit is peeling, the heat from the breakdown beginning to burn her skin. She works frantically and manages to pull it off. It crinkles up on the floor and turns from metallic grey to deep black.
“Something must have gotten through to my buoy. My suit has disintegrated.”
“Just the overload burst. I’ll grow you another.”
“‘Just the overload burst,’” she mimics. “I got fried, Cruz!”
“I know. I can’t scan you without an interface suit, though. Check with medical, please.”
She sinks back into the chair, careful of her burns. Not exactly the response she’s looking for. But then what did she expect? She grunts (intolerable little shit!) and wonders what the hell she ever saw in him.
“How’s the stock?” she asks. As planet-fall coordinator and biofarmer she needs to know that the colonists for this particular drop are unharmed. It has taken over sixteen stops this time to find a suitable host-planet, one with an eco-system from
which their nanos can grow the living habitats, like the ship grows her a terrestrial body for ground work. Diversity of terrestrial biologicals is not necessary, even a small ecosystem will do.
“Organiform nodules seem undamaged, although I can’t get a proper signal from its grid. If we can’t verify its authenticity, we’ll have to consider the stock contaminated. In which case, as resident biofarmer, I’ll need your signature on the liability forms.”
Her heart freezes. This is not what she had anticipated. She’s never lost stock before. Never. Liability forms? Had it come to this for her already? Why not? She had already felt the slow process of marginalisation creeping about her months ago. “You could be wrong, Cruz.”
“And what would you have me do? Start up the sequence? If there is even a slight chance of contamination, bringing them to life could be the cruellest thing we could do.”
“I want a thorough check, and a second opinion. I’m not convinced,” she says.
“Well, luckily you don’t have to be.”
“Wrong,” she replies. “We are in disagreement, and so protocol demands third-party inquest.”
“Just a minute, please—”
“You need me to be in full agreement with you on all and any aspects concerning the possible loss of stock. And I call for direct committee intervention.”
All department heads and their lieutenants sit on the committee. That includes Cruz and herself. But they will both be excluded from the voting process, as they can’t be seen as being unbiased: a conflict of interest in regard to the greater good.
“We both know that will take time. Time we don’t have. Karlyn,” he says in a low and even tone, leaning his round face into the camera, “stop fighting me.” She knows he’s tired of fighting her. He’s always fighting her.
“Already logged and received,” she spits out.
“Great.”
“I’m gonna run a diagnostic,” she insists. “A direct interface with its grid.”
He sighs in resignation. “Knock yourself out.”
“Grow me another suit. I’ll schedule a walk as soon as it is ready.”
“Sure. But first let’s run through the information on Beta’s failure.” Cruz begins rerunning the recorded data. “Funny. It shouldn’t be doing that!” he says to himself.
“Should take about five hours for the suit to be ready. Right?”
Milky ice crystals now form on the bubble as the sun sinks fast, smudging the view, producing an eerie, cloudy-white glow.
“Isolating pattern buffers,” he continues, then mumbles: “It shouldn’t do that!”
“I’ll be down in medical if you need me.”
She looks up through the bubble transparency and notices a group of humanoid aboriginals, squatting in the brush and tall flower-trees nearby. Some fondle with a loving fascination the twisted bits of biohabitat, supports bent in upon themselves, tips blackened, then turn to stroke each others faces with a slow, deliberate caressing, as they always do.
“Sixty percent corruption of Beta’s data,” he continues. “Still might be able to save it.”
A handful of the little hominids are watching her, now. Childishly, she sticks her tongue out at them.
“Karlyn, isolate the induction flow subroutines. We’re gonna need….Always intrigued by bloody mud crawlers….Hey! Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Clear as ice,” she snaps, getting up, and flips her camera the finger.
The first sign that something was going down came when Beta’s AI Systems Platform developed a flutter in her bioprogramming matrix. Karlyn thought it nothing at first, probably a power surge somewhere that shot through the system. Happens. Cruz had let it pass too, so even he had thought it not worth mentioning. But then it happened four times.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” says Cruz, voice booming through the bug’s speakers. “Find the problem and get back up here.”
Karlyn watches the morning sunlight ooze its way through the foliage, like a thick soup. Similarly, her mind oozes through her brain—An after effect of last night’s uneven sleep. She can hear the hanging foliage brush against the cloudy transparency in the breeze. A scratching sound, wanting to get in.
“If you think you can do it better, Cruz,” she replies, closing the last seal on her new biolastic suit, wincing, as her skin is still a bit raw, “by all means, feel free to join me.”
“No thanks. Terrestrial mud crawling is not my idea of a good time. The stench, the filth, bad working conditions, nah!”
This place isn’t the only thing that stinks, she thinks sourly as she rubs her eyes, attempting to wipe away the dream that follows her from the bed in medical. In the dream she was in a deep forest, surrounded by flowers, pollen gliding through the air rich in golden sun rays. Nice fairy tale image. Sniffing a bloom, the flower’s petals closed around her face, fine tentacles rushed down her throat. She felt like her insides were being ripped out. She awoke with a start, her body burning, throbbing.
She brushes the vision aside and now gets herself a cup of vitajuice from the service kitchen and proceeds to stalk through the empty lower deck to the equipment locker, her bones feeling heavy, her skin tough. It seems like only yesterday that she had been enjoying the ease of one-third gravity in the bioring ship, before climbing into the reconstruction couch and going into stasis to wake up here. Wherever here is….
She touches a panel and the locker door melts away. She stares at the untidy shelves.
….and to wake up here with him. With him. It never stops surprising her that she had renewed her work contract. Especially when he had been made supervisor of her beloved farming program. Four hundred years of seeding experience and that asshole gets the big chair. She rolls her eyes in disgust. Committee politics, and he was good at playing the game, his new squeeze toy being the assistant chairperson. Her stomach twists with that thought.
Farming has been her life. Now, would he dare threaten to take that, too?
She considers the pulse gun, hanging in its display.
Karlyn had renewed her registration of monogamy too, despite the demise of their affair. She had discovered later that he had never registered as monogamous when they were together. By rights he didn’t have too, but he should have informed her out of courtesy at least. Instead, he had let her heart accumulate unfair romantic notions, notions of unity and familial obligations, setting down roots, notions he had no intention of entertaining.
“This is who I am,” he had said, after she pleaded for him to reconsider their relationship. “Didn’t you know?”
She folded her arms across her chest. “You needed me,” she said accusingly. “To get on the committee.”