Maria deposited Hiro facedown on a medbay bed. There were no clean ones, so she had to put him back in the bed he’d been confined to. She removed his jumpsuit, cleaned him, and sutured the wounds closed. He’d bled a lot. She set the medical printer to synthesize more blood for him.
She realized with despair that she couldn’t use the doctor’s smart syringes, so she hooked Hiro back up to the painkiller drip—half gone—he had been on before.
“I wish you hadn’t drunk so much,” she said. “For that matter, I shouldn’t have either.”
Hiro spoke up suddenly, startling her. “I spent a lot of time in jail for the yadokari crimes, and then more time with psychiatrists, trying to keep them subdued. Hypnotic suggestion worked, but only until I woke up again in a new body.”
Maria held her breath, worried any sound would break him from his conversational trance. He didn’t open his eyes. “The one thing I found that silenced them, the other voices, is drinking. A doctor told me that in a bar. She told me that as my drinking buddy, not as my doctor, because she said it wasn’t right for her to suggest a patient drink more. But she suggested I try it. It worked. I was suicidal at the time, the only way I thought to kill them would be to kill myself. But then I discovered that a strong sake fully put down something inside me that hours of psychology and psychiatry couldn’t.
“So what I mean is, I can hold my drink,” he concluded. He reached out, not opening his eyes. She took his hand. “We are all pawns, Maria.”
She managed a smile, but it slid away quickly. “Yeah, we all got played. Big-time.”
Hiro didn’t answer. He breathed long and deep, finally asleep.
Maria collapsed into a chair and wept.
Bebe. Bebe printing out a fat, juicy pig. Bebe printing out a piping hot cup of coffee, just the way Maria liked it.
Maria’s eyes snapped open. Why was she dreaming about Bebe?
“Now I know I’m either dying or becoming more sane, dreaming about a machine making a pig from synthetic proteins and high-quality flavorings that it takes—”
She pushed herself up hard out of her chair, cursing to herself for not thinking of this earlier.
“—it takes the data from basic mindmaps of the crew,” Maria finished. “Shit. Bebe can read our mindmaps!” She rushed to the door.
And Bebe was big enough to cook a pig.
“Holy. Shit.”
Maria stood in the server room staring at Minoru’s facial hologram. “Open up. I’m going to find your lost data.”
His eyes widened in surprise, but he let her in. She went past his databases, and his programming, and his personality, into the corner where she usually put commented code.
And there it all was. His memory of himself, his childhood in the Nippon islands. His schooling, his mischief. She found where everything belonged and spent the night putting him back together.
She got Hiro’s tablet and pulled up the printer instructions. Now that she knew what to look for, she found it—a packet within the instructions held a highly compressed file.
“Christ, Minoru, you really are a genius,” she whispered. “But this is going to take me some time.”
Day Five
She worked non-stop all the next day, first on the data that Minoru had hidden from everyone including himself, and then on modifying Bebe by cannibalizing some of the doctor’s tech.
She checked on Hiro from time to time. He was sober now, and not inclined to look directly at her. She couldn’t blame him. She left food and water for him silently, and got back to work.
She fell asleep on the kitchen table at last, as Bebe began printing an altogether new protein-based form.
Hiro found her in the kitchen, dead asleep. He was hurting and needed more painkillers. He didn’t want to talk to her, but she was all he had. Minoru wasn’t answering his queries, but it was clear that he wasn’t trying to kill them with a lack of life support anymore.
He leaned on his crutch and saw that the food printer was busy.
“Maria,” he said, his eyes growing wide. “You didn’t. Wolfgang’s going to be so pissed at you.”
Maria sat up with a gasp, looking around fearfully. She blinked several times, and then focused on him. “Oh. Right. How’s it coming?”
Bebe was creating something gruesome, organs and innards, and she peered through his door with interest.
“You think Wolfgang’s going to be mad?” she asked.
“He’s Wolfgang. He’s mad at everything. But who is that?”
It was her moment, her redemption, possibly.
She watched the program on the doctor’s scanner, which she had rolled into the kitchen to hook to Bebe via cables, running hacked software through the food printer.
“Minoru Takahashi. I found a copy of his DNA matrix. It was in the printer instructions. He put it there for you to find.”
“That unbelievable asshole,” Hiro said, shaking his head. “Too smart for his own good. Do you think this is going to work?”
“He offered to be first. If it doesn’t work, he goes back into the computer and then I try again before we print the rest of the crew.”
“How are we going to print the rest of the crew? We don’t have mindmaps or anything.”
She patted Bebe. “This thing is so complex it can pull entire mindmaps from the spittle it takes from us. Including personality. That’s how it figures out what food you want exactly at that moment. I was able to extract a mindmap from that and cross-reference it with the backups I had on file. They’re identical, only with our more recent memories. Mix that with the DNA matrix I was able to get from the doc’s scanner, and this might actually work.” She grimaced. “We also have a great deal of DNA just sitting in the gardens right now, if we need it.”
“That’s amazing,” he said, shaking his head. “Wait—if Minoru isn’t flying the ship, then who—”
Maria didn’t look at him. “I am. I took my own map and stripped out what I had to, then made it fly the ship.”
“Shit, you should have made Paul do it.”
“As much as I agree with you, I’m not making those calls. We’ll wake him up. Try him. Judge him as a crew. Then and only then will I do that to him. And even that feels wrong.” She looked at the ceiling, dark circles under her eyes. “I told you I don’t find this easy.”
She stretched, wincing. Bloody spots bloomed from her bandages, which she hadn’t changed. “Besides. We can’t trust him unless we very carefully go over his mindmap.”
“You realize we’re going to have to go get the other printer for food. No one is going to want to eat out of this one ever again,” Hiro said. “Well, I’m not going to want to. I don’t know about the rest of them.”
They sat in silence and watched the food printer slowly knit together a fresh human clone.
It took five hours, but Bebe was finally putting the last details into Takahashi’s hair, something Maria felt could have been skipped. Bebe was very thorough.
It dinged.
“Dinner’s ready,” Hiro said, and Maria gave him a tired smile.
She held her breath. What if she was wrong? What if she just created a meal that looked like Takahashi?
He stirred. Opened dark-brown eyes and blinked. Looked around, and started in surprise.
Maria wrenched the door open and slid out the pad they had put in there for the printer to create his body on. “Minoru, it’s okay. You’re okay.”
He looked around, eyes wide and frightened.
“Maria. You’re Maria,” he said. He felt his hands and face, shaking slightly. “You did it.”
“You’re the one who left all the data for me,” Maria said. “I just put it all together, after I found it, of course. You’re going to have to tell me how you managed to compromise the food printer’s manual.”
Minoru’s eyes locked on Hiro’s, and he climbed awkwardly to his feet and laughed. He said something in Japanese, and Hiro answered. Minoru hugged Hiro tightly, and Hiro groaned in pain.
“Careful. Hiro doesn’t have a shiny new body like you do,” Maria said, handing Minoru a jumpsuit.
The men continued to speak in Japanese as Minoru dressed, and Maria felt left out. She cleared her throat and they stopped talking.
“Now that you two are awake, I’m going to get some rest in the brig. Wake up the rest of the crew—Minoru knows what to do. When everyone wakes up, let me know.”
She left them without waiting for their answer, and trudged to her prison room. She knew Wolfgang would put her there eventually anyway.
She’d never been so tired.
She estimated it would take fifteen hours, minimum, to make the rest of the crew, minus the murderer.
It was a full twenty-four hours before Hiro came to get her.
He looked much improved, with freshly dressed wounds and a clean jumpsuit. He smiled at her and entered the room.
He sat down on her cot and looked up at her silently.
“What?” she finally asked, exasperated. “Are they back? Are they okay? Did the saliva work?”
“Joanna says if we were on the Earth, you’d get a Nobel Prize for this. Wolfgang wants to let you rot in here, but he’s mellowing.” He cocked his head. “Why didn’t you hack him to remove the fact that he’s going to hate you for everything you’ve done?”
Maria gaped at him. “Are you kidding me? I’m not going to alter his mind for my convenience. That’s who he is. If he hates me, I’ve got to work harder than commenting out some code to make it up to him.”
He smiled at her for real. “I think that’s the first big step to doing so. While he’s pissed as hell, he’s impressed that you allowed him to be pissed as hell. This has in turn confused him. He’s sleeping.”
Maria grinned. “Good to know. How’s Minoru handling his new life?”
Hiro laughed. “Well, he’s already fixed the old printer and begun eating everything it could make. Mostly pork ramen. Then he slept for about twelve hours. Then he spent a lot of time in the gym putting his new body through the paces. For science, he said.”
“I guess he likes his new world,” Maria said.
“Anyway, Katrina and Wolfgang are talking about your situation now. I’ve already given my opinion. I said I would check on you. You’ve got to be getting hungry now.”
Maria’s stomach was tight with anxiety. She had been hungry earlier, but now she couldn’t imagine eating.
“What was your opinion?” she asked.
He looked at her for a moment, then reached out and took her hands. “Will you, if I ask you to, remove the yadokari from my head? Give me a fresh mindmap that’s only me?”
She made a strangled laugh. “Bring me a terminal and I’ll do it right now. I’ll do anything I can to make you better—”
He interrupted her with a kiss, fierce and unexpected. He pulled back after a moment and she stared at him in shock.
“Thank you.”
Hours later, after Maria had showered, had her wounds re-dressed, and ate, she sat with the rest of the crew.
She explained how she had hacked the body scanner and Bebe’s powerful capabilities to move beyond food preferences to creating a full mindmap. She explained the secret instructions Minoru had hidden within the printer long ago, before he had been transformed, when he knew what was going to happen to him and tried to figure out the best way to lay bread crumbs toward fixing himself. Wolfgang watched stony-faced, while Joanna was unabashedly fascinated. Katrina looked confused, while Minoru nodded.
“Can you program Paul to fly the ship with no ulterior motives to betray the crew or the mission?” Wolfgang asked.
Maria nodded. “That’s simple. I can strip away the same stuff I did in my own mindmap that’s flying us now.”
“Set her free, put her in a gardening robot or something,” Joanna said. “Paul needs to work to make it up to the crew. And we need to be able to trust him.”
Maria nodded.
Katrina looked around at the rest of the crew. “In light of the fact that you saved the crew in multiple ways, solved the murders, fixed the cloning problem, and freed our enslaved AI, we’re not going to charge you with any ethical hacking crimes.” She glanced at Wolfgang’s stony face. “As for holding grudges, I can’t promise anything, but I expect everyone to do their best to work together within the crew.”
“Thank you,” Maria said.
Joanna picked up where Katrina had left off. “Wolfgang has given up command of the ship to Captain de la Cruz again, who has agreed to counseling. But I’m of the opinion that now that our secrets are aired, there should be less paranoia and more trust. We’re continuing with everyone in the same roles, except you will take the role of chief engineer and Paul is sentenced to become our new AI.”
“What about Minoru?” Maria said, indicating her head toward their new crewmember.
“He’s going to work as an assistant to the captain,” Wolfgang said sternly. “He has his own infractions to work through, and we don’t want to give him too much power to start out with.”
Minoru crossed his arms. “You had your entire world turn into a lie, and you became a crazy clone hunter. I’d think you of all people would understand my actions better.”
Wolfgang tensed, but Joanna placed her hand on his shoulder. Maria marveled that the doctor could calm him immediately.
“Also,” Hiro said, “since this whole ship was launched to fail, we’re kind of worried that there’s not reliable information about the planet at the other end of this mission. So we’re going to be doing a lot of research as we get closer to Artemis.”
“Or we might be turning around and going home after all,” Katrina said.
“Won’t they be surprised to see us?” Maria asked, smiling at last.
“Our happy crew, and our mission, are works in progress,” Joanna said, smiling slightly. “We’ll figure it out. We’ve got a lot of time to do so.”