The only part of the Dormire’s mission that hadn’t gone wrong, apparently, was the state of the cargo.
While the ship carried her skeleton crew, within the hold were two thousand humans sleeping in cryo. Within the servers in the hold were over five hundred clone mindmaps. Maria and the other five were responsible for over twenty-five hundred lives.
Maria didn’t like to dwell on the responsibility. She was just happy to hear Hiro confirm that all their passengers were still stable and that the backups were uncorrupted.
Each human and clone passenger had reasons for coming on the journey: Adventure and exploration drove many of the humans; escaping religious persecution drove many of the clones. Between the two groups, a fair number of political and corporate exiles traveled to escape jail, indentured servitude, or worse.
All of them were driven in part by the fact that the Earth was losing habitable land as the oceans rose, and territorial and water wars were breaking out worldwide. So the rich, as always, left because they could.
The reasons the crew were on the ship, however, were slightly different. Each had the simple motivation of being a criminal attempting to wipe the record clean.
Their destination, the planet Artemis, was fully habitable, a bit smaller than Earth, and seemed like paradise. It orbited Tau Ceti, in the constellation Cetus.
Maria doubted their paradise would result in humans and clones living together much better than they had on Earth, but people had rosy dreams and big ideas.
“Have you ever attempted suicide?” Hiro asked as they carried the jumpsuits and chair back to the cloning bay.
“That’s pretty personal,” Maria said, running the fingers of one hand through her long hair and grimacing at the sticky mats she encountered.
He shrugged. “You just saw my answer hanging above us. I’m pretty sure that when all of this is done, Wolfgang will decide what to do with that little detail of today’s misadventures. Earth cloning laws aren’t going to be ignored out here—they made that pretty clear before we left.”
Maria wondered about his criminal past. She sighed. “I did attempt it. Once.”
“What stopped you?” He didn’t ask if she had succeeded; if she had, she wouldn’t have had legal right to wake up her next clone.
“A friend talked me down,” she said. “Isn’t that what usually happens?”
“Wish I’d had a friend a few hours ago,” he said.
“You’d likely still be dead, just in there,” she said, pointing to the cloning bay.
“But I wouldn’t be a suicide. I think Wolfgang’s looking anywhere for someone to blame for this.”
“You’re here now. Let’s take care of the immediate problems. Then we’ll figure out what happened to us all,” Maria said.
The captain’s voice drifted down the hall, a cry of disgust.
“Whose idea was it to turn the grav drive on?” she shouted.
“Yours, Captain,” Hiro said as they entered. “You wanted to be able to stand on solid ground.”
The cloning bay still looked like a nightmare, but at least it was a nightmare under the rule of gravity. Dodging bodies and biohazardous human waste was a situation she never wanted to even think about again. Maria and Hiro had tried to prepare themselves for the new gravity-affected view of the slaughter, but the dead bodies bouncing around the floor—gravity was not yet strong enough to let them stay where they fell—turned out to nauseate them in a new way. The blood and other fluids had splattered on the floor and walls, and some on the crew themselves. Maybe Paul had been smart to want to stay in his vat.
“It was rhetorical,” she said, holding on to the wall and bracing herself on the floor. “I didn’t know it would be this bad. So what did you learn? Did you have any problems without IAN? Or could you access him from the bridge?”
“IAN is still down, Captain,” Hiro said. “Luckily for us, in the unlikely occurrence that IAN is down, the helm unlocks. Otherwise, it’s suicide. Or genocide. Is it genocide if we kill everyone on board?”
Maria winced.
“Speaking of which, all of our cryo-passengers are alive and accounted for. One bit of good news, right? Yay?” Hiro ventured a smile. Katrina didn’t return it.
The captain turned to Maria. “Give me a less chaotic report.”
Maria swallowed. “I’m not sure what Hiro did, but it didn’t take him much time to get the grav drive working again and access the nav computer and check on everything. Anyway, we have more important news.”
“Here, let me.” Hiro held out his hand and counted off his fingers. “We’ve been in space close to twenty-five years. We’re twelve degrees off course and slower than we should be going. Not to mention—”
“Did you correct the course?” Katrina interrupted.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It will take a while to get back, of course, but I righted our direction.”
As Hiro was letting the captain know their situation, Maria quietly passed out jumpsuits. Wolfgang snatched two without looking at her, thrusting one at Paul—who had grabbed instead for Joanna’s wheelchair and was steadying himself with one hand on his vat and the chair in the other, shielding himself. Joanna took Paul’s suit from Wolfgang and traded it to him for her chair with a kind smile. Dr. Glass accepted her suit with a smile, slid into it with practiced ease, and climbed into her new wheelchair. She steadied herself against a cloning vat until the gravity increased to keep her stable on the ground. The legs of her jumpsuit drifted lazily from her tiny legs.
“Want something to tie those up so they don’t drag?” Maria asked, pointing at the dangling cuffs.
“Thanks, but no,” Dr. Glass said, pulling them in and tucking them neatly under her. “I’ll go and get my other prosthetics from my room later. Or my crutches. When this calms down.” She waved her hand at the horror show around them.
Maria followed her gesture, at the bouncing bodies, the splattered gore, the frazzled crew. “I’m not sure when this is going to calm down. There’s a lot of stuff going on.”
Joanna quirked an eyebrow. “You mean there’s more?”
Maria grimaced and pointed to the captain, who was hearing the story about them discovering Hiro’s body. She moved to stand beside him. The gravity was improving, bit by bit, as the drive got the ship turning fast enough.
“It looks like suicide,” Hiro said, avoiding the captain’s eyes.
“But we don’t know anything for sure right now,” Maria added. “He’s also younger than all of our clones.”
Joanna held up a finger. “That on the surface means nothing worrisome; he could have died recently for any number of reasons.”
“We won’t know if it’s suicide without examining the body,” Wolfgang said.
Hiro looked at him, surprised. Maria hadn’t expected Wolfgang to give him the benefit of the doubt either.
“There’s one more thing,“ Hiro said, looking at Maria.
So it was her turn to deliver the bad news. She sighed and squared her shoulders. “The big news,” she said to Katrina, “is your previous clone isn’t dead. She’s in medbay in a coma.”
The captain said nothing, but the color drained from her face and her lips pursed tightly together. She looked at Paul as if this whole thing was his fault. “Enough. You get to work. Hiro, Joanna, with me to the medbay. Wolfgang, you’re in charge here.”
Paul stood, now fully clothed, staring at Katrina. He had stopped sobbing, but he still shook slightly. The thick synth-amneo drained off his hair as the gravity slowly returned. He didn’t move.
“Doc, that’s not normal, is it?” Maria asked, jabbing her thumb at the frightened man.
“On rare occasions, a clone can have a bad reaction to waking up,” Joanna said. “It’s not unlike waking from a nightmare, being disoriented and not knowing what is real.”
“Only this time he woke up to a nightmare. Poor guy,” Maria said.
“Captain, a moment, please,” Joanna said, and pushed her chair carefully toward Paul.
One of the best things about cloning was that, even if there were no modifications done to the genes, each clone came out in the best possible shape at peak physical age. Maria remembered Paul as a mid-forties white man with a large belly and poorly cut blond hair. His arms were covered with dark spots like mosquito bites that he scratched nervously so they never healed. He wore a full beard and greatly disliked the tight (to him) jumpsuits that they were forced to wear as uniforms.
None of that Paul was here now. The only resemblance was the wide, watery blue eyes that stared out from a strong face, clean skin with a few moles and freckles, and a toned body. Not bodybuilder-toned but certainly not someone Maria would kick out of bed. If he were not looking on the verge of a breakdown.
“Paul, we need you to step up and do your job,” Joanna said calmly. “If there’s a problem with this current body or mindmap, you need to let me know right now. Otherwise we need you to get IAN online.”
Wolfgang raised a white eyebrow. “You think I didn’t tell him that already?”
“You used different wording,” Joanna said, not looking at him. She gently reached out and touched Paul’s hand.
He jerked it away from her. “Y’all could have given me a little privacy,” he said hoarsely.
“Privacy?” snorted Wolfgang.
“That’s ridiculous. If you ever want a checkup, you’ll have to get used to getting treated by me,” Joanna said.
Paul looked at his corpse, his face turning a bit green. The body that lay tethered to the others on the cold floor; the one with multiple bruises in his neck was more like the one Maria remembered, only older. He looked worn; space and time had not been kind to him, as he weighed even more than her memory. He wore a ratty T-shirt of a band long dead, and his jumpsuit was zipped only to his waist. The top half of the suit draped behind him as if his ass had its own cape.
The living Paul gulped and looked up. “What—”
“Happened? You know as much as we do. That’s what we’re trying to figure out, and that’s why you need to figure out what’s wrong with our AI.”
He nodded once and focused on the console across the bay. “I can do that.” Stumbling, he walked past them and gave the dead bodies a wide berth to get to the terminal where they could access IAN.
Wolfgang bent to examine the corpses.
Joanna nodded. “Ready, Captain.”
Katrina led the way down the corridor, Hiro pushing Joanna’s clumsily bouncing wheelchair down the hall behind her. Hiro thought that the doctor would have preferred to wait for the ship to achieve full gravity before they moved, but she didn’t complain.
When they took the turn in the corridor toward the medbay, Joanna called out for Katrina to stop. “Take a moment before you go in there. This kind of thing can be quite upsetting.”
“What of the many kinds of things we’ve seen today are you referring to?” Katrina asked with a touch of acid in her voice.
“Encountering your previous clone,” Joanna said.
“How many times has it happened before? Unless I didn’t hear of new codicils, having a second clone is highly illegal, right?”
“Well, so’s murder, but that doesn’t stop people,” Hiro said, forcing lightness into his voice.
The captain’s body was stiff as she forced herself to slow down for Hiro and Joanna to catch up. In another situation, Hiro would have been amused to watch her internal struggle, but he was busy wondering how he would feel in this situation. This specific one, anyway.
He doubted he would react well. Finding his own body dead of apparent suicide in the helm was enough to prove that.
Currently the captain was in the situation where a clone was alive who had memories she didn’t share. There would be legal and moral considerations as to who retained the right to the very being of Katrina de la Cruz. Fighting for the right to lead the ship would be inevitable, but that would likely be only the first of such battles.
Or they could just read the law exactly as it was written, and terminate the older clone. That sometimes happened too.
IAN could have helped them with this decision, but, well, that was a current dead end.
They entered the medbay. The captain walked right up to the bed and looked down at her own older, comatose body. Her skin paled, then darkened, and her lips went white. She took a sharp intake of breath and turned her back, facing Hiro and Joanna. “Recycle it.”
Joanna gaped at her. “That’s all you have to say? That’s a person lying there.”
“Legally, the moment I woke up, that became just a shell,” Katrina said. “Recycle it.” Striding as purposefully as she could in the low gravity, she left the medbay.
“See, that’s what I told Maria she would say,” Hiro said, glancing at Joanna. “But I think we need her.”
Joanna nodded. “Our only witness.” She moved to check the readings on the terminal beside the bed.
“Seems unethical, besides.”
The doctor rubbed her face. “I hate these problems. There’s never a good answer. Can you check and see if my spare set of prosthetics are here?”
“How often have you had this kind of problem?” Hiro asked as he looked around the medbay while Joanna rooted through a drawer. She pulled out a tablet and turned it on.
“We are given a number of clone-specific ethical questions in med school,” she said. “This is only one of them. We studied things like how to deal with mind hackers who botch a job, or do too good a job. How to judge if a clone’s early death is suicide. Who to blame if someone is cloned against their will or at the wrong time. We had a whole year on ethics.”
“Just one year?” Hiro asked. “That can’t be enough. I’ve had a few lifetimes and I still don’t understand it sometimes.”
The medbay closet held several jumpsuits, a small overturned plastic table, and a collection of shoes. The legs the shoes were supposed to be on were nowhere to be found.
“Where am I supposed to find these legs?” he asked.
“If they’re not there, they’re in my quarters. If they got displaced because of the grav drive failure, they couldn’t have gotten far.”
Joanna was making notes from the machines the captain’s clone was hooked up to. She didn’t look up when Hiro joined her, merely reached her hands out and kept reading digital charts.
“No legs, sorry,” Hiro said, going to the other side of the captain’s bed. Everything in the medbay was meticulous; anything that wasn’t bolted to the floor or magnetically held down was in containers already secured using such methods. “You’re apparently not a messy person, so there’s not a lot of places for the legs to hide.”
The captain, now that Hiro had time to look at her, did not look well. Her long black hair was gone, shaved so that her head wound could be treated and bandaged. Tubes of all sizes came from her body, pumping things in or taking things out.
“She was attacked only two days ago,” Joanna said, looking at the machine’s display. “That’s how far back the data goes, anyway, but from the looks of the wounds, it sounds right. I won’t know until Paul gets IAN online and we can get the locked computers going. Then I hope we can access our logs.”
“They’re fully locked down?” Hiro asked. “But the engines and the nav system had an override.”
“Apparently it’s an emergency lockdown that happens with the resurrection switch. To give everyone time to acclimate before making any rash decisions,” Joanna said, frowning. “Although it could just be another safeguard to avoid sabotage.”
“It seems every single safeguard failed,” Hiro said, shaking his head. “Cutting us out of the computers doesn’t seem like good planning.”
“I’m with you. But they thought that IAN would be around to help make these decisions. We weren’t supposed to be needed. Hopefully Paul can find my logs concerning the captain’s status. Once we unlock Wolfgang’s logs, that should help us identify who attacked her, and we can learn some more.”
“Then I guess it’s safe to say that she wasn’t the murderer,” Hiro said, “unless she’s good at beating herself up.”
“I don’t think it’s safe to say anything right now,” Joanna said. “You’d be surprised what people are capable of.”
Hiro swallowed back his reply. Not really.
Even with the grav drive turned back on, the doctor hadn’t removed the old clone’s restraints. Hiro tested one and Joanna shook her head at him. He raised his eyebrows. “You afraid she’s going to run away?”
“She’s our only witness, if she wakes up,” Joanna said. “And our only suspect if she is somehow involved in the carnage out there.” She jerked her head toward the cloning bay. “It’s safest for everyone if she stays strapped to the bed.”
“What about the captain? The current one, I mean?” Hiro asked. “She gave you an order.”
Joanna sighed and leaned back in her chair. “When it comes to medical disagreements, I have jurisdiction. We may need to protect this one from her. Have you ever had your clones overlap?”
Hiro shook his head, the often-repeated lie coming to his lips. “My lab was ethical to the point of being boring. Have you ever broken clone law, had your clones overlap or anything?”
The doctor was silent for some time.
“This should be an easy answer,” he said. “It’s a yes, no, or I don’t want to talk about it, Hiro, let’s talk about what you think’s been happening in rugby for the past twenty-five years kind of question.”
“Just considering how much to say,” the doctor said. “Memories grow hazy.”
“And we don’t know yet who to trust. Fair enough,” he said.
Memories. He had many. His childhood was crystal-clear. The details of his various lives tended to blur together, though. He was usually grateful for that.
“I’ve lived a long time,” Joanna finally said. “Before the Codicils, even.”
Hiro whistled. “No kidding? So you must have had multiples at one time, or lived in the golden age of hacking.”
“That’s a funny way of describing the time when people would mess with a clone’s DNA as if it were a cake recipe instead of the fundamental matrix of a person,” Joanna said sternly. “It was not a good time. Bathtub baby incidents were cropping up, along with hearings on the ethics of DNA hacking and the even more questionable ethics behind mindmap hacking. One of the greatest technologies in history was outlawed because of opportunistic fatcats and outlaw hackers with no principles. Is that ‘golden’ to you?”
Hiro remembered the stories from history class, having been born after the Codicils were in place. Bathtub babies was the term for children born with undesirable genes, the wrong gender, or a disability. The parents would record the DNA matrix and the mindmap, then pay extra for a hacker to change the gender or disability, or even—he remembered with discomfort—to make a mixed-race baby favor one parent’s race over the other’s. Once the new, shiny, perfect clone was programmed, the parents would “dispose of” the damaged one and wake the new clone.
It went beyond children. World leaders were kidnapped and modified to fit a rival government’s needs. Lovers were modified to fit a partner’s needs. The sex trade grew in leaps and bounds. Eventually the penalty for hacking was death.
“I don’t mean that the bathtub babies were good. But if something needed to be fixed, something genetic and deadly, then the hackers could do it instead of forcing someone to die from MS over and over again, right? The really good ones could modify a sociopath, I heard. And the Codicils put an end to that, to all the good hacking. I understand why they did it, but it seemed like overkill to ban all hacking.”
“Loopholes would have been found if we allowed even a little bit through. Even after the laws passed, some hackers went underground and kept working. You can’t catch all the roaches.” She sounded bitter. She put her hand on the captain’s and patted it twice. “I was never for the pointless killing of an older clone in order to benefit a newer one. And it happened far more often than the history books say it did. I will do all I can to protect this one.”
“You may need a guard,” Hiro said.
“Katrina’s upset, but I don’t think she’ll act. She has other things to worry about, after all,” Joanna said. She sighed and checked the reading of a blood sample a diagnostic machine had taken. “All vital signs are steady. She’s suffered some severe head trauma. Honestly. If we were back home, we’d activate the DNR and just euthanize her. But we need her alive for now.”
“Playing God isn’t as exciting as you’d think,” Hiro said. “Why can’t we just take a mindmap of her brain?”
“And put it where?” Joanna asked. “We don’t have a hacker on board, and it’s even less ethical to grow a new clone just for her memories, which are likely damaged. Where does that put our captain, then?”
“Probably pissed as hell at us. Then she can recycle us and replace us with clones of herself,” Hiro suggested.
Joanna smiled. “There you go. Seriously, without IAN to watch her while I rest, I’m going to need to sleep in here. Can you give me a hand making up the other hospital bed?”
Hiro started looking about the medbay for linens, but found none. “I guess there will be sheets in storage. Or I’ll see if they drifted down the hall or something.”
Joanna nodded, focused on the captain’s clone again. “Thank you.”
“Doc?” Hiro asked as he snagged a chair with magnetic casters on the legs and slid it across the floor to the captain’s bedside.
“Mm?” Joanna said, looking at the readout of the numbers again.
“You never said whether you had met a previous clone of yourself,” Hiro said.
“Actually I haven’t. My lives have been fairly boring. I like it that way.”
“Until now,” he said.
“Until now,” she agreed softly. “At least our cargo is safe. Otherwise the mission is pointless.”
“True!” Hiro said brightly, and then realized how ridiculous he sounded. “Kinda like finding a diamond in a pile of shit.”
The intercom above their head crackled to life with the captain’s voice. “All crew to the cloning bay. Now.”
He sighed. “Why do I think the pile of shit just got a little deeper?”