All right, who did you become?” Maria asked as her door closed behind her with a whooshzz. She faced her rooms. It was an odd, ghostly feeling, missing so many years. She saw signs of herself everywhere, but someone who was a different person than she was now. She found herself mourning the dead woman, the Maria who would be remembered by no one.
Maria and Hiro had looked at the box that contained the new food printer and agreed that they would need to rest for an hour before tackling it. Which made sense, as Maria hadn’t even seen her rooms in all the chaos of the day. She longed for sleep and a shower, almost more than she longed for food.
But not as much as she longed for answers.
Maria rubbed her head and sat down on her bed. It was made neatly, and she assumed she had done so that morning. She was so tired, her new body nearly sick with adrenaline.
Dying with no knowledge of the time around her death: That had happened too often to her. It made her feel adrift and lonely, and the fact that her crew was in the same boat didn’t help much. There was no way to ensure that they were telling the truth about remembering nothing. It’s possible they had their memories and were lying to her.
That was simple paranoia right there, and she shook her head to clear it. They each had some semblance of the confused panic she had seen in the bathroom mirror.
A digital frame glowed pleasantly beside her bed, silently flipping through photographs of her lives. She watched it cycle, letting the memories calm her down.
There had to be hundreds of pictures. Thousands, due to her dabbling in photography in her second life. Black-and-white, color, landscapes, and people. So many people. Friends, lovers, an occasional relative. Most clones didn’t keep track of family, as after a few generations it was just uncomfortable to show up at a great-grandson’s family reunion looking forty years younger than he was celebrating. But she had tried, mostly keeping track of great-nieces and -nephews. The awkwardness wasn’t as keen when it didn’t involve direct descendants, who tended to be resentful when a clone ancestor kept ahold of their considerable wealth.
She smiled at the pictures of the Day of the Dead and Christmas; memories of holidays and childhood were the strongest.
More photos flitted by and she let them wash over her, waiting patiently. One thing being cloned several times got you was patience. She spent a few passive years simply waiting for annoying people around her to die, like a horse who occasionally flicks its tail at a fly. To experience the other side of the coin, she also spent some years practicing aggressive revenge against those who wronged her, and found the passive life more enjoyable.
Nostalgia reared its ugly head, wanting her to pause the slideshow to focus on one of her lovers, a man who hadn’t wanted to clone himself to stay with her forever, but she let it go by.
Not all of the photos were good memories. Some held no memories at all: She had photographs of her own dead body taken by her cloning lab, the only information she had about how she had died those few strange times. She had been shot in the head both times, her body shipped to her cloning lab after the death. She supposed she should be slightly grateful to those who had killed her, because they could have killed her for good if the cloning lab hadn’t had proof of her previous death. She’d worried that she’d been used for some purpose and then killed so she would have no memory of it. The broken bones supported that assumption.
Now, here were the pictures she was interested in. After that last shot in the head, she had been more careful, asking her patron to hire security to protect her from whatever threatened. Not all the work for this patron was technically legal, which gave her an unfortunate criminal record, but it also gave her the opportunity to become one of the crew aboard the Dormire. Convicted felons could have patrons too.
Pictures scrolled by: her patron, her dog, Bradley (unexpected pang here—they had cloned animal DNA in their databases, but living so many decades without a dog was lonely), the Dormire under construction, Maria with the crew, Akihiro, unsmiling Wolfgang, nervous chief engineer Paul, the charismatic Captain de la Cruz, and the smooth, unflappable Dr. Glass, standing tall on prosthetic legs. Then the Dormire, huge and gleaming and complete, with the moon in the foreground and the Earth a shining blue body in the sky. How proud she had been to be part of this crew. Exciting mission, clean slate, new planet!
Maria sat forward on her bed. Now came the pictures she would not remember. Her heartbeat sped up as she watched, but there were only pictures of Hiro at the helm, grinning at her. Wolfgang and the captain having dinner, conferring with their heads close together. Paul with a bandage around his head, waving from the medbay. The six of them playing a video game together in the theater. As the years went on, the photos grew less frequent, probably because nothing new happened in deep space to the same six people.
Sometimes there were five of them. She assumed the sixth crewmember was taking the picture. If you knew the photographer, you could learn a lot about how different people photographed the same things.
Paul’s photos always seemed to be crooked as if he just couldn’t be bothered. Katrina and Wolfgang’s were both straight and boring. Joanna had an eye for photography, catching Hiro’s smile, or Wolfgang’s startling blue eyes at just the right time. She liked to take pictures of them in the garden, it seemed. Hiro’s photos were erratic, sometimes focused only on Maria’s face, sometimes on the background, sometimes on Wolfgang.
She closed her eyes for a moment to gather her thoughts, and fell asleep instead.
Shouting woke her up. She had fallen asleep sitting up on her bed, for only a few minutes according to the clock on the digital frame. But the frame was showing video, not photos.
Maria was not a videographer. She liked photography. But she had switched her camera to video. It was swinging back and forth as Maria ran down the hall. She caught sight of the walls, of her own panicked face, the floor. Expletives followed her. Hiro was screaming at her, words in Japanese and English, the kind of words it would take a lot to apologize for.
“I told you he was acting different. After what happened with Paul—God, was it twenty years ago?—I wanted to catch this one on video. He caught me—” Maria’s voice said, and then the frame went dark briefly, and then started over with a smiling young Maria at Mass on a warm Christmas Eve.
Maria jabbed at the frame to go back, bidding farewell to her childhood in favor of her lost years. There was only a glimpse of Hiro in the garden, looking into the deep pool where the water scrubbers worked, talking to himself furiously, then catching view of her and giving chase.
She cycled back more, but there was no more video. Why was that her only video in all the years aboard the Dormire?
Hiro’s face, twisted with rage, haunted her even as she got off her bed and made sure the door was locked. She squatted down and checked her personal safe that she hoped still lay under her bed.
She let out a relieved sigh when she found that her valuables were still there. All but one. She locked the safe again and slid it deep under her bed. Around her room, she saw the wall terminal with a small drive below it, plugged into the mainframe. She pulled up the operating system, since IAN was still down, and accessed the drive.
Unlike all the logs, the data were still there, in all their glory. She chewed her lip, then blessed the firewalls that had protected the drive. She removed it, unlocked her safe, then tossed it inside.
She wondered if she should tell the captain, but decided to wait for the right time.
Maria took a long shower to remove the tacky fluid, and finally felt like herself for the first time since she had woken up. She slipped on sweatpants and a T-shirt and set an alarm for fifteen minutes so she could catch a short nap. Then she would go back to work.
Alone with Hiro.
She would hand her frame to the captain tomorrow; this wasn’t important enough to wake her up. It was probably a joke Maria had played on Hiro, or one he was playing on her.
Speaking of Katrina, she might demand searches of all the quarters. Maria made a mental note to find a better hiding place for her personal items. Items she should spend some more time with later.
As Hiro loaded the drive into the terminal in his room, he thought about the captain and Wolfgang challenging each other with their killer instincts. Two wolves among sheep that recognized each other, maybe?
He needed to find someone to confide in; otherwise the mission would die due to lack of trust, not the multiple murders. But if the two people in charge were already murderers, what did that make the others?
The drive had one video on it. It was of Hiro’s own tear-streaked face. He stood alone in the helm. He took a deep breath and then spoke in rapid Japanese.
“If by chance they want to wake me up again, tell them not to. I’m having blackouts. I don’t know who I am anymore. She was badgering me, pushing me, wanting to know everything about me. I think it triggered something—old.” He winced as he stuttered the words. Hiro knew what he meant. He didn’t need to say it. “Now the captain is hurt, IAN is hacked, our mindmap programs are shot. And I can’t remember a lot of the last few weeks. I tried talking to the doctor, but she says it’s just stress and insomnia, and gave me something to sleep deeper. Then I woke up in the garden right where Maria found me a few weeks ago. I don’t remember going there! I was picking herbs. I think I was helping—”
His voice had climbed to a high pitch. He closed his eyes for a moment and then continued, a bit calmer.
“I’m hoping they can clean up my mess with me gone. IAN shut the grav drive down a minute ago before he started eating all the logs. I have to hurry if there’s going to be enough gravity to do what I need to.”
He took a great hiccupy breath. “Something is broken inside me. Maria’s seen it. I’m so tired. I’ve fought it for too long. Don’t wake me up again. Let the broken, branching line of Akihiro Sato end with me. I’m sorry. If I hurt anyone, I’m sorry.”
During this confession, his hands worked at the cable to fashion a noose. Watching this, Hiro found himself telling himself No, don’t do it, even when he had already witnessed the inevitable result of this suicide note.
The camera then shot the glass dome of the helm, and the spinning stars began to slow down. Hiro returned with a screwdriver and his boot. “I need to secure this on an external drive. I can’t trust IAN not to delete this. I’m signing off.”
The video feed went black. The audio continued for another moment, catching a distant scream, well down the hall from the helm.
Hiro sat for some time, motionless on his bed. Then he watched it again. He pulled the drive from his tablet and walked over to the trash chute that went straight to the recycler. He dropped the drive down the chute, listening to it clack against the sides, faster and faster as the heavier gravity on the outer floors of the ship pulled it down with each ricochet.
He took a short shower, then lay down and stared at the ceiling.
That suicide note would just give them the wrong idea.
He hadn’t killed everyone.
He knew he hadn’t.