Cold Sleep, page 16
I stop, wiping my lips. “What’ve you given me?”
“She is very suspicious, hai, very suspicious. How to reassure her? Ah. Kara-chan, this is merely a mixture of salts and sugars to help you recover. There are no drugs in the water. I promise. See?” He takes the flask and drinks three large gulps. Something of the tone he’d always had when dealing with a patient has crept back into his voice and with it a greater sense of returning sanity.
He’s been alone a long time. It’s unfair of me to think he’s gone crazy. After all, if he had, I’d still be on ice or worse, some revenant zombie.
“I’m sorry, Doc. You can’t understand what it was like… and then… waking to…” I’m crying. Don’t ask me why. He comes forward and holds me as gently as he can with arms still sheathed in the armor of his voidsuit. This close I can hear the burr of the suit’s actuators and servos. They should be silent. Maybe my mistrust is misplaced?
“Hush, Kara-chan. There is time now to get your strength back.” He begins to sing softly, his voice cracking as he stumbles over words in Japanese which stretch my knowledge of the language. Something about a canary and the song of the cradle.
He’s treating me like a child.
My tears dry but I don’t shake him off. Let him think he can soothe me like this. Let him think of me in a paternal way. Playing along will make me safer until I can be certain of his sanity and sure he’ll do as I order.
Slowly, I pull back, pretending to dry my eyes. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me.”
“She’s supposed to be the strong one. Watashi wa kanojo o machigaemashita ka? No, it is shock at all she has been through. It’s alright. Kara-chan. I have a plan. But first, let’s warm up and eat—if you feel ready?”
He scuttles about—not taking his voidsuit off. Paranoia? Or has he grown so used to shifting from atmo to vacuum that he’s forgotten? The third possibility, that even despite his precautions we’re at risk from the revenants nags at me. But there’s one way to take control of the situation.
“Safe for me to take this voidsuit off?” I ask, trying to keep as offhand a tone as I can while I watch for his reaction.
“Hmm? Oh yes. I should think so. Faster than this one,” he taps the armor of the chest plate. “I find it easier to keep on than using power to heat the air. Naze kanojo wa watashi o nayama seru nodesu ka? I cannot bear more questions…” A puzzled expression comes on his face, and the skin darkens on his cheeks behind the scraggly beard. “I’ve been alone for so long, I’ve started talking to myself, haven’t I?”
I shrug, keeping my expression calm and my voice soothing. “Don’t worry about it—how could you not? It must have been so hard, being alone. Doing all of this without any human contact. Talking to yourself must have been the only way to stay sane.”
His eyes narrow and some of the old piercing intellect reveals itself in his gaze. More disturbing, there’s no sign of the hesitancy which had marked my old friend. He’s changed in more ways than one while I’ve been in cold sleep.
“Yes, it has been hard. Here, let me make you some food. Emergency rations ran out some time ago but I managed to adapt one of the tissue synthesizers to grow a beef and algae soup.” I wrinkle my nose at the jar of green, lumpy slop he places in front of me. “It has all the necessary nutrients. And it is full of umami.”
“Great.” I choke down a mouthful of the awful broth. “Umami, huh?” Rotting fish more like. Still, my stomach feels less like an empty flapping sack once I finish and the last of the polymetamine induced nausea fades away.
“So… the big question.”
“Hai?”
“How did the revenants get out? They had no voidsuits, beyond the one you breached. With Revenant Zero in…”
“You cannot access some areas of the ship without atmo. Sensitive sections are kept isolated even in the event of a ship wide blow out.”
“Yeah. I know, we’re in one.” I cast an arm about. “But there are no caskets stowed here or in any other of those sections. Did some of them survive in those areas? But—”
“I re-pressurized cargo bay four.”
“You what?” I nearly drop my bowl of algae.
“It was the only way. I needed…” his face darkens. “I needed a sample. Someone to work with to try the cure on before I risked you.”
“That doesn’t explain—”
“I had no choice. I couldn’t move the caskets so far. I couldn’t do what I needed to through the locked casket. Or even in cold sleep. I needed to wake them.”
I put my hands on my hips. “You cracked a casket and what? Zapped the poor bastard inside with EM radiation. Wait a second… Them?”
He looks away from me. Cowering almost.
“Hiroki, how many did you wake?”
“It seemed to be working. I was so sure.”
“How many?”
“Seven,” he says, hands coming together almost in prayer. “But the treatment looked like it was working.”
“You woke seven colonists when you knew they were infected with the nanites? I was wrong, you weren’t trying to hold onto your sanity.”
“You don’t understand. I figured out how they communicate—not the code but the frequencies. Found a way of jamming them. The first I woke, she started to respond. Not fully but as if coming out of a coma. My scans showed the nanites had stopped working in concert and were no longer controlling her. But she was still paralyzed.”
“She?”
“I initially thought I needed women of about the same age and with similar genotype to you. As close as I could get.”
I fold my arms. “What happened?”
“The EM therapy had worked so well, but I couldn’t stop the paralysis. Turned the machine up as high as it would go. It wasn’t working.”
“Wait, you did this to me at one point, didn’t you?”
“Yes, a much lower dose, more focused.”
“But I didn’t go into a coma, they took back control.”
“We are rushing ahead…”
“Look Doc, I don’t really give a shit about the hows, whys, and fucking wherefores. It’s worked on me now. We need to know how many revenants are loose on the ship. Where they are. And whether you can do what you did to me, to them.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” he says.
“Why have I got a bad feeling about this?”
“It shouldn’t have happened.”
“Spit it the fuck out, Hiroki. Now.”
“They split.”
“What?”
“The nanites. The first ones, they’ve changed. Adapted. Learned from their hosts. They’re willing to listen to reason.”
“You’ve been communicating with them?”
“Yes—not face to face but through the comms. Their Gestalt has developed a conscience, of sorts.”
“What the absolute fuck? You’ve been chatting to the things that fucking killed the crew? Killed the captain. Tried to fucking kill me.”
Hiroki sits down on the chair welded beside his makeshift workshop. Wipes his face and scratches the skin beneath his beard. “It’s alive. Self-aware and all it wants is to survive.”
Alive? Oh, sweet fucking… No. Control. Focus.
“I get it. It can feel fear. Good. Means we can make it positively shit itself before we wipe it the fuck out of existence.”
“Kara-chan. I think, the nanites are mostly gone from inside your head.”
“Yeah, so?”
“But if I’m wrong, the ones there, they’re still active.”
“The fuck are you saying?”
I hold one hand to my temple, the other reaches for a zero-g tether. I cling to it, my legs shaking.
“I didn’t cure you. They, it, released you.”
“You mean, anytime it feels like, I’ll find my mind torn apart again and turned into some kind of node for them.”
“No. Well, at least I hope not.” There’s the old Hiroki uncertainty. He removes a syringe from his voidsuit’s hip-bag. “If they kept their end of the bargain, they’re all in here.”
“And what do they get out of releasing me?”
“Our help. And a way to escape this ship.”
“So you’ve committed us to helping a thing that wiped out the crew and killed countless colonists. Fighting it, we flushed those VIP bastards out into space, dooming us if we return to Earth. You just know Sevran Corp will want its pound of flesh. And then M’Benga gave her life for what? The Captain gave her life for what, Hiroki? Zed…” Tears in my eyes, forming a blurry wall between me and the world, burning from the heat of rage building inside me. His betrayal of all we’d fought for…
But hey, I’m still alive. And isn’t he saying there’s a way to survive?
“I did what I had to do. You taught me that. More than anyone I’ve ever known, you put survival ahead of moral or ethical concerns. Pure, ruthless logic. I’ve always admired that about you.” I start to speak, but he holds up a hand. “As far as I can tell, we’re hurtling towards another star system at the limits of the ship’s acceleration. But the Gestalt cannot repair the damage we did. It cannot find a way to get down to the planet if we arrive there.”
“Hang on, how can we still be accelerating?” An obvious question I should have asked on waking, so much time has passed but I haven’t questioned the gravity.
“It slowed the ship, reversed thrust for a few days then accelerated again so I could work, so I could save you. It will have to stop the engines again soon, before we exceed the ship’s maximum safe speed.”
I keep my face impassive. Hiroki’s involvement with the nanite Gestalt is clearly strong. If he believes we can have common cause with it, I can’t yet argue against that, yet the pain of having my self—the ego or whatever you want to call it—stripped away by the machines is still fresh.
“There’s more. I can see it in your eyes, Hiroki old friend.”
His lips part, “She sees right through…” and then he clasps a hand over his mouth. Breaths in and out. Takes the hand away. “Gomen’ne, I will not keep saying every thought aloud. You are right as always, Commander. You would find out sooner than later and it is better I confess to you now.”
I raise both eyebrows and purse my lips.
“Yes, to the point. The split I mentioned between nanites. It means I must show you something in the medibay. And we can test—”
“I’m not leaving this room without an explanation. Now, doctor.” The tone of command which had always made him flinch to attention does little but bring a frown to his face. How much has changed…
“I have explored several further scenarios for how and why the nanites have reacted the way they have. It is still a puzzle. No other ships have reported the formation of a gestalt. None of the colonies have disappeared from contact—”
“That we know of.”
“Quite right. Perhaps, it really is because we have encountered some strange signal between the stars. Even the Gestalt does not know.” The look on my face must make my thoughts pretty obvious, as he mutters something in Japanese under his breath too low and fast for me to catch. “Getting to the point. There were several military operatives aboard Charon.”
I wave him on. “The ITF…”
“Yes, their nanotech was also affected. Maybe it was the first to be affected. That and the primal human drive to violence combined are what caused them to be so hostile initially—”
“You are fucking joking.”
“No. That’s what I want to show you. When you thought it was someone imitating Zed—”
“A Ghostface. One of the ITF’s assassins.”
“Yes. It was. They’re not just a myth brewed by all the slumrats blued out on polymetamine.”
I glower at him. My head’s feeling like every neuron is shrinking thanks to my own comedown from the nootropic. But he’s in full flow and doesn’t seem to notice this time.
“We seem to have had a contingent on board.”
“A contingent?” Pretty sure my mouth is hanging open.
“My guess is the ITF were expecting Sevran Corp to resist any attempt to revoke their corporate charter on Gliese 892. Sent some of their shock troops to make sure.”
“So when their military tech went loco it brought out what? Some kind of reaper protocol?”
“Reaper protocol?”
“Doc, you shoot me up to the fucking eyeballs with blue-sky and then get surprised when weird shit pops out. Thanks to you, I’m dealing with all this with a major comedown but you know, half the fucking time I want to break into poetry while reciting pi to five hundred places.”
“Yes. Ok. My apologies. It seemed to be the only way to bring you to a state of clarity in time. Reaper protocol is nice but I think it is less sophisticated than something like that. More like basic programming to keep the ITF agents ready and able to kill their targets.”
“Is that why the colonists started,” I gesture at my mouth, “you know, fucking with their teeth?”
“I do not think so. But the code of the different nanotech may have twisted the original gestalt to such actions. I prefer to see it as a side-effect of its primitive consciousness seeking any means to ensure its survival while strengthening each colonist’s connection to the others.”
“Explain.”
“The so-called teeth were all arrayed in a way so they linked to the brain via the nerve at the tooth’s root allowing a conduit for the nanites to use for data transmission. All were precisely fractured and set so each tooth still functions as an optical chip, enhancing the network connectivity and boosting the processing capacity available to each node.”
His casual use of the word makes my skin constrict with a sensation of icy needles driving into it.
“The Gestalt I have been in contact with has evolved beyond such primitive means or at least refined them. Probably because of how many colonists it has turned into active nodes. Its processing power is an order of magnitude greater than it was.”
It clicks into place—he’s been using the teeth as a means to communicate with the Gestalt. Maybe there are even nanites stored in them. I repress a shudder. Are they infectious in some way? The idea comes out of nowhere, another nootropic side effect—maybe the teeth are a vector for nanite transmission? Whatever, it’s a major risk he’s taking. Had been taking. For well over a year. I tune back into what he’s saying.
“…still active postmortem. That’s part of the reason why a violent solution is ineffective—”
“Wait, what did you say about postmortem?”
“The nanites don’t die because their host does. We’re rather lucky they’re not able to self-replicate. Otherwise, we’d be far more easily overrun.”
“Is every corpse riddled with those things?”
“No, only the colonists. And those bitten by revenants might or might not have nanites penetrate their blood stream. Probably not if the conflict was a lethal one.”
Wild guess was right, what do you know. “You’re saying the teeth are infectious and you’ve got a whole load of them sitting there on the side? Are you fucking crazy?” I hold a hand to my eyes as a wave of dizziness sweeps over me. A whine starts in my ears like tinnitus.
“Calm down. Any part of them is potentially infectious, not just the teeth. If a revenant sneezed on you, it could be enough to transfer nanites into your system. Without the ability to replicate, a small number are no real threat whether they come from a bite or a sneeze. Unless they have access to other nanotech… like the medical nanites that were in your system for example. But I have managed to cure you, haven’t I? It’s very important you maintain your rational response to all of this. Uzai! She’s still so unwilling to trust. After all I’ve sacrificed. No, not her fault, it’s the way she was conditioned.” His face darkens. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”
“Yes, forget it. I’m calm, I’m rational,” I say, knowing even as the words leave my lips that someone who’s calm and rational doesn’t need to say it. “What’s to stop the nanites from making the dead colonists rise up and attack us?”
“Because they’re dead. The bodies, I mean. If the nanites could replicate themselves, given enough time they could create a kind of naukara out of dead colonists. But these are not the builder types nor the weaponized destroyers we heard about last time we were on Earth.”
I think briefly of all I knew about the tech—so new to me yet seemingly everywhere. “You mentioned something about United America trialing aerosol nanites.”
“I did. If this were to happen there…” He spreads his hands.
“End of the human race, at least as free individuals.”
Hiroki nods. “But when they were no direct and immediate threat to my safety, I realized there was one way of resolving a conflict we had not tried.”
“You spoke to them.”
“Just so.”
“What’s this got to do with the split?”
“The military nanites are also not able to replicate but their programming was quite different. When I separated some of the colonists from the rest and then reconnected them, it triggered a process where the colonist nanite programming separated from the military one. The ITF agents on board have triggered the evolution of a consciousness with one purpose—seizing the ship and slaughtering everyone who stands in the way, which is to say everyone not carrying nanites with its program. Afterwards, they would likely look to conquer one of the existing colonies, slaughter everyone there. And so on.”
“Is it capable of anything other than killing?” I asked.
“That is what makes it dangerous. Imagine a system totally dedicated to achieving military superiority over its enemies—everything would be fed into the goal of more effectively destroying them.”
“Doesn’t take much imagination, Doc. Look at history, littered with examples of the military-industrial complex.”
He nods, considering my words. “Yes, yes. You’re right. I had not considered it in those terms but it does fit.”
“So this Complex has a commitment to its ideal without the possibility of dissent.”
“Hai. It would make the worst juntas of Earth’s checkered past seem mild. A level of xenophobia so high as to drive it to attack anything which wasn’t a part of itself. It would be… quite insane.”
